2335. Suggestions for Raising Children — Part IX

Tactical Parenting: Encouraging Tweens

Tweens: The tween phase is marked by outside influences forcing parents to change their minds about accepting the way their child thinks. Home life is as non-disruptive as good parenting prepares toddlers to value home life over all else. It is as disruptive as parents don’t enable their toddler’s to succeed in self-development and compound their consequent good feelings about themselves into loyalty to home and family.

But that’s enough about what parents should have done. Now, what can they do? (Numbered only for easy reference.)

1. Abandon nurturing as the primary technique of connecting. To the greatest extent possible, use leadership by example. Tweens are through listening; they want to choose their paths alone except as they seek guidance over unexpected humps.
2. Mom’s expressions of love such as hugs and kisses are expected but losing their importance. Respect, trust, and admiration carry much more convincing weight with tweens.
3. Both parents demonstrate how to live up to something bigger that themselves—God, principles, standards, predictability, dependability, peaceful accord, loving one another, family. Always something bigger than personal opinion, feelings, or anger-stirred insistence. It enables and legitimizes parents to take the heat off of competition caused by child putting peers in the middle against parents.
4. Keep the home friendly and familiar, a refuge. Outsiders are not the enemy, but they are less important except to tweens.
5. Dependably and daily show interest by inquiring about accomplishments and spotlighting success from purposely doing things that contribute to development toward maturity and adulthood rather than getting along, building popularity, etc.
6. Show trust by not getting excited about undesirable peer influence. As a matter of fact, the less parents get upset, the more easily kids learn that parents are both legitimate and worthy of being listened to.
7. Spotlight tween’s ability to recognize right and wrong, fair and unfair, desirable and undesirable for the long term, what’s right for them. Encourage them to think more than feel.
8. Without finding fault, encourage tweens to weigh options and decide what is greater success outside the home and how to get there. Be patient, it takes a while for kids to bridge the gap and learn to keep parents happy and peers friendly.
9. Don’t find fault in peers, find fault in their values, standards, and expectations that differ from those taught the toddler and upheld for the tween.
10. Find ways to enable boys to find satisfaction with themselves through accomplishments. School work is best. Having a job is great. Helping mom at home is essential. Make sure they have responsibility to match their maturity and they learn to fulfill it without animosity. If boys find satisfaction in what they are doing that has parental blessing, parents should not worry much.
11. Find ways to enable girls to make themselves feel important in school, home, and to parents in the hope that their importance relating with others will not overtake family relations. If girls find self-importance in what they are doing that has parental blessing, parents should not worry much. A girl’s relations makes her feel good, but what she accomplishes develops her self-image and sense of self-worth.
12. Teach that authority figures may not always be right, but they must be obeyed. If the child doesn’t like it, they can do differently when they are adults and have the authority to judge as appropriate for time, place, and incident. (To undercut authority figures is to also undercut parental authority. Whatever the parental good intentions, elevating child over authority figure teaches them to depend on others from which they also learn to plot, play, and manipulate parents against teachers and others.)
13. Aspirations and ambitions to duplicate heroes energize children too. As toddler, heroes are found in parents. Tween boys especially look elsewhere for new heroes. Girls are not so adventurous to look elsewhere unless their current relations leave much to be desired.
14. Heroes inspire ambitions to be a better person, which promotes mature growth. Celebrity worship highlights aspirations to have what someone else has and inspires envy and jealousy. Find ways as parent to be more admirable, hopefully hero-like as a mature adult, and don’t let children see celebrity worship in the home.
15. When parents admire celebrities and tend to worship them, children see parents as admitting inadequacy. Subliminally the message settles into their hearts that they too must be inadequate. They don’t have enough. They easily mistake celebrities for heroes against whom they measure their own inadequacies and seek satisfaction in celebrity worship. Tweens are very vulnerable to making such a mistake, especially when parents set the example of it.
16. Isolate boys and girls as objects of distinctly different characteristics, interest, respect, and trust. Reinforce the differences in every way practicable. The more they are NOT treated as distinctively different, the more mixed up sexually the girls will be both sooner and later in life.
17. Females can’t have what politics promises relative to males and their nature tells them what’s right. The two are mutually exclusive. (The subject is too complex for here, but it has been described in articles titled Dark Side of Feminism and elsewhere throughout the blog.)
18. Don’t nurture boys except to help recover from bad physical hurt, and then only minimally to show trust that he can handle whatever happened. Boys develop more manly when they convince themselves of their ability to meet all challenges and overcome or recover.
19. Nurture girls in early tweens and morph away from it as time passes. They are slower than boys to develop self-confidence and independence for handling and acting on their feelings. (Boys act with little regard for feelings and so they learn from trial and error more quickly than girls.)
20. Lead by example. Self-developing kids want to become adults and do best when they figure out how by following examples they select, which means they respect the models they use.
21. Don’t aim at raising good kids; they become poor adults. Try to aim them at becoming good adults, and they will become at least acceptable and perhaps better-than-average kids.
22. Kids more than parents have to keep up with their peers. The more that children hear parents talk enviously or jealously about what other adults do—e.g., keeping up with the Jones—the more deliberately that kids want to follow suit with peers.

Parental preparation for the tweens—i.e., raising toddlers—largely determines how children pass from first grade to puberty. The biggest challenge in the tween years is the child learning to play peers against parents. Unless inculcated with significant respect, trust, and dependence on parents to feel good about themselves, tween loyalty morphs predominantly into peer loyalty. They learn to succeed and feel good by heeding and duplicating peers to prove their worth outside the home. Unfortunately, too many and too easily find it more to their liking, which symbolizes less than ideal upbringing as toddler.

——

P.S. Her Majesty Grace had specific expressions she used in private with each of three sons. Her oldest and most precious. Her middlest and most precious. And her youngest and most precious. At that moment they were her most precious. And, it gave her an acceptable and endearing way to close every nurturing or counseling session. It has humored our family ever since it was disclosed to the boys in their forties.

2328. Suggestions for Raising Children — Part II

Three monumental events rattle and shake the peaceful upbringing of children. First is dependence on mom’s love. Second is the opening of each child’s conscious mind. Third is each child’s passage through puberty. Each event can be pacified by women with sound judgment. The kind of judgment that automatically flows out of making something more important than love.

1) A woman’s love arises in two forms. Those they birth and everyone else. They can harmonize their home by blending the two forms into a common sense, well-accepted, and connected set of relationships. But her love alone can’t do it. Contrary to modern female thought, even mother-love isn’t enough.

The most important ingredient is respect continuously and equally generated into mutual respect. But there’s a catch. Respect, which is a part of mother-love, does not include respect for others.

Respect is more important than love for the process of bringing and holding people together. Respect lays the foundation for love. Without some sort of foundation of mutual respect, even mother-love can’t hold a family together.

When family members recognize they are respected as individuals, they can overlook the biases of mother-love spread among unequal targets. Personal conviction that they are respected first and loved second shifts their thoughts from me to us, from self-centered to family-centered.

When husband receives respect from wife and kids, he buys in. When husband respects wife without reservation, her authority is established. When children are respected as exceptional by gender, capability, and contribution, they take it personal that their exceptionalism is unique, deserved, and adequate for their own purpose in life. Hence, everybody buys in.

Being respected makes love credible. Human nature makes one doubt they deserve the love of another. Respect, especially trust, overcomes but never completely removes doubt.

2) Sometime in their third year, a child’s conscious mind opens and they come online as an independent person with under developed personality. Recognizing themselves as another person, they instinctively expect to be treated like the big people they see around them, who seem to do just what they please. Being copycats, even toddlers follow suit.

Trust is the most dynamic form of respect. It’s instinctive that boys especially be trusted for two reasons: a) They see others being respected and presume they are alike and deserving. b) They are self-developers. They consciously recognize their independence and expect to take advantage to do what they want to do; to play, explore, fix, look inside things, and especially climb.

Without being respected, they’re neither free nor trusted to do what they think proper, not respected as much as they think they deserve. It’s the result of recognizing that they too are a person and entitled to develop themselves as they see fit. Of course they don’t go through those thought processes; it’s instinctive and grows more intuitive with experience.

Both sexes are hardwired as self-developers. Boys deal with things and expect to do it alone. Girls deal with relations and expect to be guided without too much oversight. Both expect to be respected as they witness others being trusted to go about their own business mostly undisturbed by overseers.

Consequently, children develop themselves better when not overly supervised but respectfully guided away from threats and danger.

3) They pass through puberty. From being willing to absorb instruction, they shift to insist on giving it. From being malleable for those they respect, they shift to being one of those due respect as an adult. The less their hearts and minds are filled before puberty with mature adult values and standards, the more susceptible they are to let peers fill the vacuum. The more intensely they model themselves around adult values and standards before puberty, the less impressionable they are among those outside the family with whom they associate.

The thread starts early and never ends. To earn their respect, you have to first give it. The best form of respecting someone is to trust them. Toddlers, tweens, and teens expect it. Children show respect for parents, and parents receive it as trust and vice versa. Parents show trust and kids receive it as respect, but not vice versa. Adult expressions of respect that don’t convey trust don’t register much with kids. They aren’t sophisticated enough to convert routine parental respect into trust. To kids, trust is action and words meant to convey respect are not as meaningful.

Family success starts with greater respect for everyone. When kids arrive mom starts it with toddlers. By generating mutual respect throughout the family, mutual acceptance morphs into mutual love to hold the family together for life.

2278. CAUSES and EFFECTS — Group 05

1. Celebrity worship is female love to a fault. Wanting terribly to love someone, they lack a proper person. Girls go ga-ga over pop stars for lack of boyfriend and it’s exciting to them. Women worship celebrities for lack of having no one available or worthy enough of absorbing all their love.
2. A woman’s worshipful admiration of celebrities demeans her self-respect and makes her individualism and independence dissolve in the eyes of others. Using unknowns as role models reveals her lack of respect of friends and family as worthy role models. (Those closest to her think they’re good enough and wish she could see it, but she doesn’t.)
3. Progressive is the political umbrella under which Marxists, communists, socialists, fascists, anti-constitutionalists, anti-American liberals, and New World Order advocates hunker down, rely on propaganda to disguise their ideologies, and work together to hide their intentions from the people. Conspiracies abound, nothing happens accidentally, ideological differences arise only behind closed doors, those with power to act are never wrong, and one step back is okay if it follows two steps forward. Also, alert the public to what’s coming so that by the time it arrives, it’s old news, the media can ignore it, and public anger has lost its heat.
4. Masculine appreciation of the female gender and a man’s love of a woman begins with self-respect that enables respect of someone else. Feminine appreciation of the male gender and a woman’s love of a man begins with her self-love that enables her to share it with someone else. (We can’t share or give what we don’t have in our hearts.)
5. The subject is political correctness. Without constitution-based authority, people resent being told how they must act. They find ways to resist the expectations of people who evidently don’t respect them in the first place. A predominant majority of people accept and eventually find reason to conform to laws and social norms when they are free to choose. They are motivated to satisfy others because they are respected and trusted to live by their conscience. It used to be the standard American way, when mutual respect birthed mutual trust.

2270. She’s the Initiator

Whether you believe God designed or Nature causes it, the sexes are born with all the abilities to be compatible and woman is both relationship expert and initiator. Here’s an example of how and why she works as initiator.

• Women are born fully capable of trusting without reason, which signifies the benefit of their trust to be worth more than the risk. Women benefit much more from men who know they are trusted. Men respect women more easily and respect is essential for a man’s love to develop. The risk is that some men are not trustworthy.
• If a woman blames men generally, a man trusts neither her trust nor respect of him. He’s too vulnerable to being declared wrong for no more reason than being a man.
• If her trust isn’t unconditional for his gender, a man won’t trust her as sincere and therefore respect her. Consequently, the best root for capturing a man’s love is unconditional respect for the male sex.
• God or Nature intends that all men should be trusted except as lessons learned show each woman that some individuals should not. Men are good and necessary except those found to be untrustworthy. Each man can accept that as truth and read it as a woman’s sincerity and her being worthy of his respect.
• Women can’t trust one man but not his gender and expect that his trying to love her will cause him to believe in her trust and, therefore, respect of him. It’s a subconscious suspicion that arises in a man because of self-doubt that exists in those who sincerely love a woman: Do I really deserve her?
• Men are born neither to trust nor respect someone until they earn it. Not necessarily earn it directly.  a) Men respect men depending on accomplishments that men admire; that is, what men do holds the potential for masculine respect. b) Men respect women differently. They admire women for their feminine qualities more than female accomplishments. Qualities admired are virtues that earn masculine respect, which serves as foundation for a man’s love of a particular woman. (Men seek to marry a virtuous woman, preferably one more fascinating than other women.)

Men are born not to trust/respect unless others earn it. Women are born to trust and thus earn masculine respect. Thus, a woman’s trust is the first step to gaining the love of a man. Second step, her trust transmutes into his respect, which serves as the foundation for his deciding that she’s both likeable enough for him and he’s willing to be loyal to her, which is the start up of his love.

2014. Fathering: New Thoughts on It

• The essence of mother-love is unconditional respect for the child. The essence of father-love is conditional respect based on a mix of four ingredients. 1) The actions he takes to fulfill his sense of duty for raising his offspring. Feelings follow actions and so actions program his heart. 2) The respect the child earns in the father’s eyes. Men don’t respect without reason. Boys don’t either, but before puberty they learn to copy their mother’s respect for others. 3) Fathers respect for the mother is sufficient that he doesn’t want to disappoint her or let her think him incapable or insignificant.

• Fathers enforce mom’s teaching of obedience but they lack unconditional respect for the child; their respect revolves naturally around kids doing what mom or dad expects. When involved to impose discipline on children, men are more energized to appreciate and preserve their own self-respect than respect the culprit they face. Consequently, a natural gap exists between a woman’s urge to unconditionally respect a child and a man’s expectation that respect be earned. Mom more easily than dad earns a child’s respect. As with men, a boy’s love is founded on respect for the love object. So, son loves father proportional to his respect for dad, which emanates from dad’s trust for son.
• From toddlerhood to adulthood, children learn to respect others according to the trust they are shown as self-developers. (Boys try it independently and learn by mistakes but girls seek guidance to avoid mistakes.) To the extent they are trusted as self-developers, kids view themselves respected as a person, a boy or girl, and as a member of the family in that order. Later in life, boys self-develop as fathers, which requires they shift roles and give trust to earn the respect of children. (Demanding respect before trusting kids torpedoes the long-range interest of fathers; kids learn not to trust dad.)
• Consequently, the road of true father-love loops from endless trust for child’s self-development to ever-growing respect for father. Around and around it loops and gathers emotional momentum. But the loop needs an on-ramp. Since a man’s love builds on a foundation of respect, fathers enter the fray awkwardly. They must trust the child first if they are to be respected. (It reminds of this: Wife must first trust husband, if she expects to be respected with emotional faithfulness. Mutual love grows out of trust and respect continually uplifted with both parties adding energy with new initiatives.)
• Greater trust of child generates greater respect for father, which encourages father to serve better as near-nurturer to the toddler, leader of the prepubescent, and coach to the teen.

 

1973. Sexes Differ on Jealousy Too

Her Highness Cocoa at post 1098 asked how jealousy may be different between the sexes. So, I start with this definition. Her greatest asset is not sex itself. It is a couple’s first sex together, his conquest. Once conquered—except for minor (and temporary for her) differences in sexual performance—she is just another woman to the conqueror. He’s ready to look for the next one. The natural urge to conquer another far outweighs the natural urge to own one. She is left with the task of earning his devotion and winning his loyalty other than with sex.

Conquest confirms this to the conqueror. By yielding her greatest asset to his persuasiveness, she follows his leadership. He has done enough to thereafter dominate their relationship. Effectively he ‘owns’ her if he wants to. Her natural bonding during sex supports his conclusion. By marrying her, he doubles down on that presumption. It makes ownership permanent in his heart and obligations arise to produce, provide, protect, and problem solve on her behalf.

The lessons of life teach some men to question their nature, to doubt that their conqueror’s right guarantees her loyalty. They perceive even the smallest signs of possible disloyalty as weakening their sense of significance, and they respond easily to jealous motives. Fear motivates them.

Other men, more confident of themselves and their ability to win and hold any woman’s loyalty, do not so easily succumb. ‘Possession’ of a woman is not so large a part of their significance. They focus on earning self-admiration in ways other than owning someone. They are not immune to jealousy; it’s just much harder to trigger it.

Very different from men, women have no natural conviction that they deserve to own another. They know they must earn and keep one’s commitment through his words, devotion through his actions, and loyalty through his monogamous fidelity. The closest thing they achieve to ownership comes from conquering a man for marriage before he conquers her for sex.

Highly prone to guilt, women react differently to signs of disloyalty in their man. The lessons of life teach some women to question or abandon their instincts. To such a woman, jealousy follows her sense of impending loss of ownership in her man. She automatically blames him and just as intuitively assumes herself as the innocent victim. She reacts accordingly, and her man rejects her implications of owning him. Her obvious lack of trust wilts his respect for her and turns him off regardless of his innocence or guilt.

Other women, more confident of themselves and their ability to capture and keep a man’s loyalty, do not easily succumb to jealous thoughts. They recognize their nature and that emotional fidelity is more important than physical faithfulness. They can live with the latter but not the former. So, jealousy does not enter their thoughts until they see the red flags of impending infidelity. Mere association with another woman does not induce jealous thoughts. It just triggers suspicions intuitively held in check until evidence is more convincing. Intuition informs them that to verbalize suspicions is to destroy the trust so vital to a man’s respect of his woman. Such women are not above it but are far less prone to appear jealous.

Jealousy is not natural to either sex. It springs from lessons learned growing up and arises and intensifies according to one’s self-image of how well or poorly they relate to the opposite sex.

 

1742. Hope, Respect, and Trust — Part I

Emerson said “The world turns on hope.” Without it, a person’s energy is stifled and they sit down to do nothing or worse, perhaps with drugs. Hope motivates individuals and each has his own version. However, personal ability to influence others is required to mutualize hope between individuals, such as in a couple or family.

The world of influencing others turns on respect, which generates trust in return, which reinforces the initial respect, which reinforces the initial trust, and which continues to compound until their respective hopes find mutuality and compatibility. Respect sends the message, “I hold you in high regard.” Trust sends the message, “I’m grateful for associating with you.” Mutual interests are thus enabled to join as the person influenced shapes his self-interest to match more closely that of the influencer.

If the respect of the influencer is missing or lost, it takes some inducement, threat, or force to complete the process of influencing others.

Most people know how to show respect for and to others. But I’ve uncovered a way by which moms, dads, and other leaders screw up their good intentions. It follows tomorrow.

712. Make Mr. Promiscuous Faithful — Part 6

I close this series with thoughts from a previous post. It applies to men with a conscience about faithfulness to their wives and not to repeaters and serial cheaters.

Three noticeable phases face each marriage. Awareness enables wives to prepare, prevent, and prevail. (Some women also pass through these phases, but we describe men here.)

The two-year glitch arrives quietly as romantic love fades away in a couple’s second year together. Both undergo transformation. If an enduring kind of love has not developed mutually, unfaithfulness and separation may not be far off. 

·        Husband’s enduring love lies in the foundation of respect she has earned, especially before conquest, and her likeability as supportive mate. Her enduring love springs from the current and anticipated gratefulness for him and what he does. He looks at what she is; she looks at what he can be.

The seven-year itch arrives when his wandering eye opens. Many situations challenge him. Devotion to her and commitment to vows are essential for surviving natural pressures on him.

·        She’s in charge. Years earlier she chose a man susceptible to wander. Or, she chose a man devoted instead of just committed to her, and a man with sufficient character to honor his vows. If she didn’t or couldn’t, avoidance is difficult. Forgiveness is the next best thing, and forgetfulness is absolutely essential.

The twenty-year switch arrives when he wants to start over and hopes to do so with a trophy.

·        It’s a dream that slowly builds as his sense of significance fades, which the mid-life crisis is all about. He aspires to rejuvenation, and he’s just dying to prove it to himself with an attractive woman. He may even aspire to raise another child to overcome earlier mistakes. Or, he may simply want to prove to himself that wife has been wrong all these past many years.

For the glitch, itch, and switch, she prepares best by knowing men and her man, females and herself, and that she has unique and powerful skills for relationship management.

Throughout life and these crisis points, the harder she tries to ensure his fidelity, the more likely she will fail. We all get what we think about the most. If she constantly worries about his faithfulness, she sends signals that push him away from her. Honest-to-goodness trust provides the greatest help for her.