Helping Our Children
My role as helper is not to do things for the child I am trying to help but to educate the child; not to try to control and force change in the child, but through understanding and awareness, to change my reactions. I will change my negative to positives; fear to faith; contempt for what the child does to respect for the potential within the child; hostility to understanding; and manipulation to over-protectiveness to release with love, not trying to make the child fit a standard or image, but giving the child an opportunity to pursue their own destiny and therefore experienced the consequences of their own actions.
I will change my dominance to encouragement; panic to serenity; the inertia of despair to the energy of my own personal growth; and self-justification to self-understanding.
Self-pity blocks effective action. The more I indulge in it, the more I feel that the answer to my problem is a change in others and in society, not in myself. Thus I become a hopeless case.
Exhaustion is the result when I use my energy in mulling over the past with regret, or in trying to figure ways to escape a future that has yet to arrive. Projecting an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it, for fear that it will or won't come true uses all of my energy and leaves me unable to live today.
I will have no thought for the future actions of others, neither expecting them to be better or worse as time goes on, for in such expectations I am really trying to create. I will love and let be.
All people are always changing. If I try to judge them, I do so only on what I think I know of them, failing to realize that there is much I do not know. I will give others credit for attempts at progress and for having had many victories which are unknown.
I, too, am always changing, and I can make that change a constructive one, if I am willing. I CAN CHANGE MYSELF. Others, I can only love.
Parents of teens recorded message (405) 629-6384
