Do you need kids to be like your parents?

[digitalUID]

Originally Posted by tnff

It's a similar thing to how our parents get so much smarter as we grow from teens to 20s and 30s.

It actually had the opposite effect on me growing up. I used to think my parents knew everything when I was a child. As an adult, I started realizing how little they understand about the world as a whole. They do know things though. I call my father all the time about home maintenance projects. I call my mother when I need a shoulder to lean on. But it's the big picture stuff they don't understand very clearly; how things intertwine and impact each other. They are very insular. A lot of that is to blame on lack of education and lack of worldly experiences. I don't know everything, and they know a lot about some things that I don't know. But I understand the world in a much different way than they do because of my education, exposure to outside groups, and traveling around the world.

[Lodestar]

Kids don't come with an instruction manual so it's easy if you haven't much experience to fall back on what you know without thinking. It took a while to recognize that some of the things that didn't work for me when I was growing up also weren't how I wanted to raise my kids.

I believe that a large number of us live our whole lives in a kind of automatic trance in some of our tasks and relationships and don't even realize it.

I very distinctly remember my day of awakening as the mother of a toddler. DD and I were in her room and she was reluctant to pick up her things. I opened my mouth and automatically out came words from my mom. Hit me right in my reality button. I stopped and said to her that those were words her grandma said to me, not my own words. Then I had to start becoming a conscious thinker about what would work for us.

And there's the problem. It's so easy for us to slip into automatic pilot based on past experiences. The truth is that most of us want authenticity and honesty in our dealings with others. First we've got to recognize that we may be reacting instead of acting and then we have to develop our own blueprint based on our core beliefs, not someone else's. It's work.