Lynne Herod-DeVerges, founder Center of Light Miracles and Miracles Directory
For anyone or anything considered to have value, it must be cherished. Of course, the way in which it’s cherished is in the eyes of the beholder. Children, in the eyes of their parents and anyone else who loves them, are often cherished deeply in the beginning. But they’re not always valued as they grow. Usually, when first born, babies are seen as valuable because they are frail, helpless, innocent, vulnerable and dependent little precious darlings that belong to the people who “made” them. As they grow and develop, establishing their own dynamic personalities, being valued is not always how they are seen. Too often, children are valued based on behavior, like-ability, smart-ability or some other type of ability that I would call “conditional value”.
There’s no doubt that a child is valued because he or she is a human being and because, no matter what, the parents have love for that child. But this is not necessarily enough for the child to be valued. It’s important for the child to have self value, which then can be translated into societal value. The only way this can happen is for the child to be taught how to value and maintain self-worth. When a child is guided, without having his or her spirit torn down, self-value and worth are maintained.
Teaching children to value self takes on many complexions. For most parents, this can be difficult because everyone, without exception, trains their children as they were trained. Depending on the parental generation, (1960’s, 1980’s or 2000’s) parents de-value their children by being too stifling or too laissez-faire, leaving the children to guide themselves. Parental rearing styles can include everything from being over bearing and controlling (with fear tactics, screaming, yelling or flailing excessive drama, guilting and holding children responsible for family dysfunction) to being so aloof that children feel unimportant, not worthy of attention or effort. All of these styles de-value the child, stamping out the vital spirit within, and causing the child to believe that something is wrong with him or her.
But, for the conscious parent, rearing a child to have and maintain self value is not only possible. It is the desired goal. The way to begin this process is for parents to teach their children, through example, the art of self value. Parents must acknowledge their own personal self-worth by recognizing the truth in the questions: “Who am I?” and “How do I show up in society?” Then, children will emulate this attitude and behavior. From there, parents can value each stage of their children’s development openly and lovingly while directing them to live at their highest divine level.
As the baby becomes a toddler, oh, how cute he or she is, run-walking and stumbling over those feet! The toddler is now exploring familiar surroundings; pulling out pots and pans to bang on, reaching for everything in sight, grasping and picking apart even the tiniest of threads from the bedroom carpet. Where is the value in that? It is in the act of learning through exploration, in defining what’s around him or her. It is a way to define self, to understand boundaries and how things work. When parents recognize this without ranting about the mess, without cringing because of the noise or the dirty object in the mouth, they are validating their child for being and doing what is correct for them to do at that age.
For the older child who is not quite a teen, in order to give value, parents must be willing to let their child go through all the awkward stages, the ugly messy stages of behavior, the stages of intellectual challenge, and every other stage that brings headaches, hardships and fatigue on the part of the parent – particularly when the children are still immersed in selfish thinking and selfish acts. (You know, it’s all about them – and it really is.)
The most challenging, bar none, are the pre-teen to teen years when, confused, that young person goes through the process of craving independence while still feeling the need to be dependent. It’s a time when the body is growing and developing by huge leaps into adult form while the mind, growing like the body, is out of sync with the emotional signals fed to it from the body. A parent is not required to validate them on poor decisions, wrong thinking and yielding to undisciplined urges. But a conscious parent does value the internal struggle within them and helps guide the teen to discern the difference between what’s really him or her and the growth process being experienced, while placing value on both.
It is a learning process for everyone. But when a parent strives to get it right, there is no greater reward than the true value the child can place on self and the child’s gratitude towards the parents who got him or her there.
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