Anonymous wrote:My kid being confident - I want someone with no weird fears, someone that can speak to thousands, someone that is bold, someone that can talk to anyone, someone that is not afraid to ask questions.

Anonymous wrote:Did anyone say “our religion”? I don’t think anyone did but I may have missed one.

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Young children don’t have any “inner motivations“ separate from their id, in fact pleasing their parents by obeying the rules is how they develop a strong superego and eventually successfully integrate their emotions. You are free to allow your children to be ruled by their emotions until they develop their own motivations (altruistic love? following rules because it feels good? Young children lack the cognitive ability for perspective-taking, so I’m not even sure what inner motivations they might have to follow rules apart from the societal expectation that they should.). My children are happy and well-adjusted, in large part because they have done the hard work of independently dealing with overwhelming emotions.

DP, but anyone sincerely talking about the id and the superego has no clue about child development, and I say that as a psychodynamically-trained psychotherapist.

If you want to know how to help kids learn emotion regulation, read The Whole Brain Child. Attachment and neuroscience! It’s good stuff. Anything by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson is gold, but that one’s the classic.

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Anonymous wrote:Resilience
Independent
Kind
Healthy habits
Love of life, adventure

These are good ones! Reading through all the posts I think this most closely encapsulates what I want for my kids too.

As an older millennial who resents the stereotypes of my generation, I have to admit that the biggest character flaw I’ve seen play out amongst my mid-30s cohort over the last six months is a complete lack of resilience. So many parents just melting down and having a harder time adapting to life during a pandemic than their young kids. I see endless fatalist attitudes about how six and nine year olds will never catch up or recover from this “gap” in their education etc. etc. and I realize so many of us in the “everyone gets a trophy” generation have no coping skills. I think our kids are naturally resilient and it’s incumbent upon us to nurture that and teach them that adapting and overcoming is a part of life. All the other traits you mention really go hand in hand while leaving the door open for our kids to be who they want to be (ie dreamers or doers, makers or thinkers etc.)

+1. I also think we weren’t raised to accept negative feelings as valid emotions. We want the “bad” to go away now! I try to let my kids sit with their sadness, anger, jealousy and accept those feelings when my parents worked to fix them.

And I’m the opposite and teach my children that just because they feel something doesn’t mean it’s true. If nothing else, Covid has taught me that people have become utterly incapable of separating their feelings from fact. Our children would benefit enormously from adults who act on sound judgment and have a rudimentary knowledge of logic and rhetoric. The shift away from a classical education has impoverished a generation of parents who cannot separate hysteria from science anymore.

What? Can you give a real life example of an instance when you’ve told your child that their feelings were false so we can understand what the heck you’re getting at? I’m all about logic but it seems to be missing here.

E.g.: we have a step in the house for time-outs (we don’t spank or send our kids to their room). When they tantrum or scream, they go to the step. There is a self-control button the eldest designed and taped next to the step. The kids’ job is to sit and master the emotion they are feeling until they are able to direct it themselves, until their emotion is subordinate to their will. Children instinctively understand what it’s like to be consumed by an emotion and the practice of being able to master their feelings and not be driven by them is freeing. I don’t ask my kids to sit with an emotion or to fix it, I teach them not to respond to it until they are in charge. My preschooler calls it “being the boss“ of his anger.

Your kids do it to please you, not because they are developing and inner motivation. You do realise that the pre frontal cortex that regulates our ability to control our emotions is underdeveloped well into young adulthood right? It’s physically impossible for them to do what you describe. It may seem like they are “being the master of their emotions”, but they are just learning to bury the emotion to please you and to be able to leave the time out. That’s being motivated by fear.