In last week’s article I wrote about the pivotal balance between raising happy children in a competitive world and the importance of instilling a recognition of the importance of exercising self control.

I would like to focus now on one crucial idea that I believe is the very foundation stone upon which all successful parenting is predicated upon. When contemplating the following, we as parents will stand a great chance at inculcating our children with a healthy sense of their self importance and belief in their own strength and abilities.

Begin Early!

Parenting doesn’t begin when our kids are born. It begins years earlier as we begin crafting our own personalities. While we can’t choose the circumstances and situations that our children will have to face in their lives, we can VERY strongly influence where their starting points are. Those starting points are by and large at about the point we have reached when we brought our children into the world.

Let me explain. Dr. Murray Bowen was a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and one of the great founding fathers Systemic Family Therapy. Dr. Bowen is perhaps most famous for constructing his theory of differentiation.

“Levels of differentiation” is the description of a person’s ability to stand on one’s own and simply “be”, independent of other family members or friends. The well differentiated individual is able to maintain his own ideas and feelings without being swallowed up by the collective whole. He is able to interact with other loved ones without reactivity or the need to get a sense of worth based on what others think. The well differentiated one is able to care, love, and elicit love for its own sake, not as a means of using others or being used by them.

The poorly differentiated individual achieves his sense of meaning based on what others think of him or her. He or she will state opinions and positions based on what they perceive others want to hear. He or she will, by and large, live in fused and tension- riddled relationships and suffer from great anxiety, both their own and those of the other members of the family.

Obviously, levels of differentiation exist on a continuum. As you move up the ladder of differentiation, you are less reactive to the anxiety and reactivity of those around you and more comfortable in your own skin.

Bowen’s great posit is that our children’s levels of differentiation is more or less at the level which we parents are when we bring them into the world. The “kick in the teeth” we get from our kids as they enter their teenage years is as painful as it is because it is often a mirror for our own selves and the level of differentiation we have reached.

Hence, as we as individuals work on our own character and seek to better ourselves, in an almost metaphysical way, we elevate our children and gift them with the ability to stand stronger in their own selves and interact more effectively in relationships.

I actually have  a friend who told me something brilliant. He said that whenever he saw some character trait in his children which he felt pertinent that the child change, as opposed to lecturing the child, he would study his own character and perfect that deficiency within himself. Only then would he address his child.

So, in summary, as the first crucial step, we as parents have to recognize that having children comes with the commitment to grow as people. It comes with a sacred mandate to work on ourselves and our character. In doing so, we offer our children the very greatest gift that we can: our most empowered selves that elevate those around us and gift them with the ability to choose more wholesomely and personally.