Trusting Your Child Is Necessary

Trusting a child is necessary for the child to grow with confidence.

Once you have begun to accept the child, you are ready to begin trusting the child to

express himself/herself and do things in ways that will be unique to them self. Up to this

stage the internal parent might not have been listening to the child. Instead whenever

the child had an idea the parent might have put it down as “silly” or “stupid” or merely

sought to control every action or thought of the child.

What a loss! As you will soon discover, it is deep within the child that the purest of

honesty exists. Who hasn’t feared taking their young children into public lest a too

honest statement might come from their lips. “That man has bad breath” when stated

within hearing distance of “that man” is certainly enough to bring a blush to the face of

any parent. As the parent lives in the world of “ought to’s” and “should’s” the child

comes boldly in with statements of “what is.”

Another way to look at this might be to consider that in every situation that life brings to

us we both think about it and feel about it.

Our feelings tend to be our more childlike side (“what is”) while our thinking plays the

role of the internal parent (“what ought to be”).

This morning when I first looked in the mirror my internal child expressed itself by saying

deep inside of myself something like “WOW! You have a large nose!” He was merely

expressing an honest statement (I do have a fairly large nose). On some mornings, the

internal parent will censor the child by saying something like “How dare you speak that

way. Shut up!” On other mornings, the parent will throw an “ought to” into the mix by

siding with the child and saying something like “You sure do have a large nose and you

SHOULDN’T have one that big.”