689. What Moms Never Hear — L: Infancy

Care and encouragement—aka nurturing—develops a child’s self-esteem defined as how well one likes and appreciates Self.

©     Self-esteem primarily forms in infancy. The infant’s brain integrates nurturing with genetic inheritance and hardwires the subconscious mind with some degree of high, low, or in-between self-esteem.

©     The brain hardwires itself in response to stimuli from caregivers and its environment before the conscious mind fully opens within the first three or so years. Unusual though it sounds, in effect the subconscious mind learns to like and later appreciate Self according to how others show proactive appreciation. Thus, self-esteem comes on line.

©     High self-esteem becomes brain-wired from plenty of loving and tender care without interruptions or shocking disruptions. In the absence of such care, wiring still takes place, but the baby’s brain wires itself with low self-esteem (aka self-worth).

©     Love applied and dislike denied to baby. The deeper, more varied, and proactive the appreciation shown, the higher the self-esteem develops.

©     Love denied and dislike applied to baby. Poor nurturing includes bickering, yelling, ignoring a baby’s discomfort or pain, loud noises since nothing makes sense, shocking interferences, and similar disturbances in care and encouragement. Poor or absent nurturing hardwires doubt and negative emotions that haunt self-esteem for life. Self-hatred springs easily from it.

It’s not an event but roughly a three year process. Self-esteem provides foundation. After that, self-image and self-interest become the phenomena that govern one’s life.

 

624. Mothering Sons — #02: Responsibilities

Effective parenting flows from identifying and agreeing which parent is primarily responsible at each phase of son’s development. Fortunately as God designed and Nature provides, the optimum coincides with parental strengths in three roles—nurturer, leader, and coach with full explanations in later posts.

• Infants—Primary responsibility lies with mom, because nurturing and mother love are particularly vital to generate high self-esteem. Father is responsible to support, reward, and encourage mother.
• Toddlers—Same as for infants! However, self-esteem ceases development as self-image and self-interest begin development with opening of son’s consciousness and awareness as a person.
• Tweens—Both parents work as leaders. Dad is big boss, mom is little boss. Son reports to mom, and she reports to dad. (Before you take offense, remember the blog purpose avoids raising bad boys.)
• Teens—Parents become coaches. Their status, stature, and acceptance depend on their respective leadership effectiveness before puberty—i.e., the respect they earned, which arises much from the respect they gave to son.
• Post teens—Parents become ‘hired’ advisors, which means they offer advice only when son seeks it.

Specialize in nurturing before the tweens, leading in the tweens, and coaching after the tweens. Mom and dad can do it easily, when they decide who has primary responsibility, who has mutual support role, and then fulfill their responsibilities during each phase.

This and the previous post, 623, introduce and define the series. What follows plugs gaps, fills voids, and answers questions you may have.

623. Mothering Sons — #01: Phases

I dedicate this series to Her Highness Adrian. My words, not hers: What’s the secret to raising good boys? The answer: Don’t raise bad ones! —at which this series aims. Good boys are essentially accidents left over from teaching boys to like Self, respect others, admire good character, and live up to something bigger than themselves.

Mother: Get ‘perfect’ out of your mind. Perfection appeals to males as it does to females, but perfection is never what someone else identifies. Also, any human knows he’s incapable of perfection all the time about all things. So, quit trying to make him anywhere near perfect. He’ll resent you and become a disciplinary problem, mama’s boy, or perhaps co-dependent on someone or something.

Mother: You may not like it, but your sense of mothering should evolve as son passes through four development phases. Nurturing and love are not always the most important. Sometimes mom’s strengths are bothersome. More later.

Mother: View child development in three phases: He’s taught before first grade, he learns firsthand before puberty, and he already knows everything after that. So, mother has to face three phases of roughly six years each. But I cut the first phase roughly in half.

• Infants—This is the first three or so years until the conscious mind comes alive and the child recognizes himself as a person, toddler to you.
• Toddlers—The second three years or thereabouts.
• Tweens—This phase runs from about age six or the first grade until puberty.
• Teens—This phase runs from puberty onward.

Effective parenting flows from emphasizing three roles with mom and dad switching primary responsibility. That’s next.  

569. Smother Love — Part C

This post continues how moms elevate kids over father/husband. These are definitely not ‘best practice’, because they program child’s mind negatively against father.

• Mother distorts child’s perceptions with demeaning comments about father/husband. Not purposely perhaps, but carelessly making her nurturing chatter or self-talk both negative about husband and audible to the child.
• Thinking, treating, and telling a child in the tweens that he’s number one programs the mind of both mother and child to elevate the child over father/husband. It threatens when mom supports child in the wrong over father/husband in the right. The man of the house, whether right or wrong, will prove himself right when they gang up on him. Imposing dominance reinforces his reign and saves face in whatever the situation.
• When child has been hurt or harmed, claims of ‘you’re most important’ or ‘my favorite’ sound good but self-defeating. It confuses child’s mind. He sees a different world, when he’s not hurting. How can he be number one in her heart, when she slights him relative to others? Her credibility may take a minor hit with child, but that’s not the problem. It’s the loss of respect for father, when the child becomes convinced that he is number one and drags in mom to counter father’s disciplinary actions or husband’s decisions.
• As part of nurturing chatter or hoping to lift or reinforce child’s self-esteem, mom repeatedly tells first child he’s most important thing in her life.
• What does she tell second child? Most important too? Third child? (Her Majesty mother Grace confirmed our family structure with lighthearted, complimentary, and irrefutable confusion: Her Oldest and Most Precious, Her Second and Most Precious, Her Youngest and Most Precious, and me. By leaving me out, she isolated and elevated me as husband above the boys. However, after boys were grown, out of title envy I claimed my own—Her Oldest and Most Able at the Table.)

480. What Moms Never Hear —I: Babyhood

Two minds merge at birth, but moms seldom hear this:

©     Nurturing or its lack develops and shapes her child’s self-esteem. How provided and who provides the nurturing determines how the child likes and appreciates Self for life.

©     Father has drives that conflict with nurturing. He’s driven to shape human events, whereas mother is driven to shape human lives. Trying to alter or close this natural gap does so at the expense of infant’s self-esteem.

©     Mother with a good mothering self-image nurtures her baby well. She usually strives to be the main authority, protector, and perhaps exclusive nurturer.

©     Mother naturally does well unless she lets negative feelings—e.g., selfishness, envy, jealousy, overwork, and frustration—slip into her thinking and reshape her nurturing.

©     Mom is the most qualified and prepared to make everything positive and consistently appreciative of infant. Unfortunately, she’s also the most influential for souring a child’s appreciation of Self.

©     A mom’s low self-esteem, unflattering self-image as mother, or detached self-interest as a nurturer can easily interfere with her quality of nurturing. This bodes ill for the child’s self-esteem.

Mom does her best. She does even better, when father is available. For more about her nurturing and father’s contributions see the NURTURING series in the CONTENTS page at blog top.

Details about self-esteem follows at post 481.

474. What Moms Never Hear — E: Parents develop too

There’s no such thing as motivation, there’s only self-motivation for both parents and, except in the earliest years or under threat of hurt, children.

Parents inclined to see their parental roles as ‘motivators’ may want to consider other methods. Love and nurturing fade in effectiveness for influencing and changing a child’s mindset as a child ages. Common sense counsels parents to develop new skills and techniques. These work: leadership guided by principles in the tweens and coaching guided by respect and trust in the teens.

Ø Self-interest is the psychological force that energizes self-motivation. The same psychological function motivates each child, albeit underdeveloped, unpredictable, and often nonsensical.

Ø Except to relieve anxiety and assuage hurt, both love and nurturing become increasingly ineffective to energize children after age six or seven.

Ø A leadership hierarchy, one parent more powerful and respected than the other, shapes toddler thinking best as the little ones transition toward the tweens.

Ø Leadership overpowers love and nurturing in the development of tweens.

Ø Good leadership specializes in respect and trust downward before it’s earned and upward after it’s earned.

Ø Parents that split leadership roles into primary and secondary functions enable their selves to balance practical hard-headedness with loving soft-heartedness—the essence of raising tweens. 

Ø Effectiveness of both parent leaders depends upon acceptance, endorsement, and backup of each other in front of the kids. Otherwise, respect for one or both weakens, and kids pick up more details for later getting their own way.

Ø After puberty, love and nurturing don’t work well in the teens, although they can help with angst and hurts. Leadership also weakens. Consequently, coaching works best to retain parental leverage.

Ø Mutual respect and trust exchanged between leaders and followers in the tweens provides the best foundation for successful coaching in the teens.

Considering only parental leverage in the teens, leadership principles provide good guidance for parental development in the tweens.  

NOTE: More later about leadership principles and coaching. Nurturing is addressed in the series of that name listed in the CONTENTS page at blog top.

Details about the perils of co-equal leaders follow as next post facto.

468. What Moms Never Hear — A: Intro

I dedicate this series to Her Highness Marianne. Dealing with teen boys concerns her, as it does others, so this series will look at prepping boys and girls for the teens.

Raising kids can be simplified with clearer terms and concepts. I place on the table the following high-impact themes as openers:

M RESPECT—How parents respect and treat each other is more vital than how they treat their children. (This presumes conscientious parents and the absence of abuse and maltreatment.)

M AUTHORITY—When parents disrespect adults and discredit authority figures, kids learn and will act the same way toward the parents.

M ROLES—By not specializing in distinctly different roles, parents generate unneeded confusion, mistakes, resentments, and power struggles that confound parental development. It compounds to weaken child development.

M VALUES—Children inherit, adopt, and otherwise absorb their values from three sources: parents, heroes, and peers. But it happens respectively in three phases of development.

M DISINTEREST—Mental growth causes disinterest with techniques and ‘motivators’ that parents use. One impact: Love and nurturing lose their energizing influence after the weans. This mandates that parents develop themselves.

Next post facto: Mom’s Song.

309. Lifelong husbands—made, not born — Part II

The males’ default habits are not girl-, woman-, wife-, or even family-friendly. Females either program males around their defaults, or else husbands and fathers flop around eager to escape domestic responsibility and ‘confinement’.

Her nature craves togetherness; his craves independence. Men have little natural interest in yielding independence to fulfill female dreams for paired-up closeness.

Men need at least two foundations to rise above their default settings: (1) Unconditional respect for the female gender equal to or greater than respect for the male sex. (2) Appreciation and gratefulness for what a woman brings to partnership, home, and family above and beyond what he expects his woman to do for him.

Males have little or no natural interest in learning such things. They react and rely on the winning hormones of dominance. Except for mom’s nurturing before about age seven, males resent being taught directly by females. Of course, it ain’t fair. It’s Nature in all its permanence.

Before puberty, dad’s leadership and female teachers’ inputs help, but not as effectively.

Indirect methods of teaching, influencing, and persuading work beautifully, when hidden beneath the superior ‘weapons’ in the female arsenal. Weapons such as hard-headedness before marriage, soft-heartedness after marriage, charm, guile, and expectations for higher standards and living up to something greater than Self.

A man learns permanently, when he draws his own conclusions. It applies both throughout life and the four-phase process that helps females breathe longevity into husbands.

1.     Dedicated parents civilize boys for family life. Primarily, and for greater effectiveness, mother nurtures in the weans, father leads by example in the tweens, and both coach in the teens. (Details in posts titled Weans, tweens, & teens)   

2.     Girls use crossed legs to tame hormonal urges. What boys can’t conquer— whether girl or mountaintop—signals virtue, earns respect, and energizes determination to conquer. (Details in posts titled Chaste courtship works.)      

3.     Marrying-age women reject men for unmarried sex until manly devotion to one woman reveals husbandly potential. (Details in posts titled Virtual Virginity and others.)

4.     Finally, cooperative wives domesticate husbands for home life. They compensate for whatever shortcomings their man brings to the mix. (Details in posts titled The high cost of cheap sex and others.)

Males need mental adjustments throughout life to help fulfill female hopes, dreams, and expectations for family life. God designed and Nature makes females as the relationship experts. So, the responsibility for good husbanding and fathering falls to them, as both individuals and sisters in Womanhood.

[Part I about lifelong husbands appears as post 304.]