Most parents are doing the best they possibly can, but the majority of them do not have a good understanding of how to measure their success. Leo Tolstoy said, “One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love,” years before Freud said, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
Work generally takes up a third of the time we have available for living. Children do not listen to what we say, they watch what we do. It becomes difficult to inspire our children to pursue their natural gifts and passions when we are not enjoying what we are doing over one third of the time we have for living.
In order for us parents to be the fountains of inspiration for our children, we must discover our natural talents and chart our own paths. One method of measuring the success of a parenting journey is by our own ability to inspire children to pursue their natural gifts and passions. Parenting and charting our own paths can sometimes seem like contradictions, yet the best way to inspire our children to recognize their natural gifts is by discovering our own.
Climbing the ladder of success demands a sense of purpose, and a sense of purpose can be cultivated in children by supporting and allowing them to be completely absorbed in the activities they are passionate about. That’s how they learn to love every moment of their lives.
We can measure the success of a parenting journey by our ability to model what a loving relationship looks like to one’s work because it’s our own ability to experience love that has the greatest impact on our children’s beliefs about their own.
Payman Fazly is a co-founder of Parent Footprint, an innovative platform that simulates the experience of sitting down with a therapist to enable parents to become aware of why their emotional reactivity is based on how they were parented and to allow that awareness to become a catalyst for change.
This blog is an excerpt from Payman’s recent book: Project Love: What Legacy Do You Want To Leave?
Visit: www.paymanfazly.com to learn more about Payman and his book.
