Have you ever stopped to think about your parenting and ask the question of yourself and your spouse; “What are our real goals with our kids?” What is it that we really want to accomplish? How will we know we were successful as parents and as a family? Failure is pretty easy to see and characterize but what of success? If you don’t have a conscious goal in your parenting, one will be assigned to you. You will be guilty of unconscious parenting.
The unconscious takes over when we put the conscious brain on cruise control. Just like unconscious driving, it always ends up in wreck. As it turns out our unconscious goals are usually not up to par and come out of motivations that say more about us than about our kids. For instance, one unconscious goal might be simply this; “ I want my kids to like me.” I know it sounds kind of shallow but we are talking about the unconscious mind here. Everyone feels that way. We do want our kids to like us. If we were to sit down and write it down as a goal we would feel silly. Yet I have seen parents who are parenting with this as their primary goal. They try and do everything they can to please their kids and appease their kids. They employ stuff, events, experiences, and usually permissive and liberal boundaries thinking that if they do their kids will like them.
Another often-unconscious goal of parenting sounds like this “ I want my kids to have/do all the stuff I never got to.” This goal seems unselfish, and indeed a parent with this goal may sacrifice much for their children. But ultimately this is pointed toward the parent’s own unfulfilled fantasy’s and expectations or possibly even a repudiation of their own parents. A child raised with this overarching goal exists in the confusing world of constant entitlement and disappointment. The parents that achieve it give their kids everything they didn’t have and the kids grow up thinking it is all about them. More often, the parents are rarely ever able to deliver on their goal. So the child grows up thinking that some how they got ripped off or constantly hearing parents say “ I never wanted you to have to …. like I did….”
There are many more examples of unconscious goals (you will hear more tomorrow) but all of them come from a fairly consistent source: Self. Whether it is hoping our kids have more, avoid some perceived trauma, or achieve some lofty status, when self is the source it will always fall short. What we really need to do is look to God for the source of the goals of our parenting. It is not by mistake that Jesus teaches us to relate to God as Father. When we look at and then consciously shape our parenting based on God’s parenting goals, we will quickly move past the more shallow goals of our unconscious reactions and move into a place where we are parenting with purpose. The results will speak for themselves.
Are you unconsciously parenting? If you were to write down your top 5 overarching goals for you children what would they be? Tomorrow we will look at some of the goals God has for us and that we can apply to parenting with purpose.
See you at church,
Pastor Chris
