Respect is Earned

Healthy Parenting: Respect is Earned

by Arsiei Darksbane

(An article from my unpublished blog at www.healthyparentingway.com)

What is respect?
How can we gain our children's respect? How does respect make our lives easier? Respect among all members of a household equals harmony in the home. So realizing that respect can never be demanded, only earned, is a vital step in acquiring harmony in the household.

Parents: Get over yourselves.
One of the first things I had to do as a parent was learn to get over myself. What does this mean? We as parents can sometimes take ourselves too seriously. We forget what we are and who we are and where we came from and let the power of control over another person take us in the wrong direction. We don't mean to do this. It is a natural human tendency. However with proper education and a bit of self-control, we can learn to be a leader in our home rather than a dictator.  The first thing you have to do is remember being a child, how you were treated, how you reacted to it and what would have made it better. Remember the people in your life at your child's age, and remember which ones you liked and did not like. Did you obey the ones you liked better? Did you feel happier and more peaceful with the people you respected?

Don't let self-importance tear you down. You are a beautiful person to your child. If you want to remain beautiful in their hearts and minds, you must never let yourself feel more important than them. Their wishes, their hopes, their desires are every bit as important as yours. This means that their wishes, hopes and desires are also every bit as important as your work, your phone calls, your busy schedules! Never let yourself feel that you are greater than your child. You have strengths they do not yet have: Wisdom, experience, knowledge. They also have strengths that you do not have anymore: innocence, imagination, freedom. If you're lucky, you haven't lost these traits entirely, but if you look deeply you will realize your child has a wisdom you have lost to some degree. Being carefree and dreaming big is a power all of its own.
So first, respect your child for who and what they are. They are a beautiful individual, full of lessons for you as well. So respect them and guide them and love them. Now the next step...

Be Respectable
Be careful when you go to define that word. "Respectable" picked up a social standard in and around the Renaissance and it gained force through the Victorian age and onward. People have taken a set of social statistics and deemed that "Respectable" and those types of terms tend to stick in our minds... However don't be fooled. What is respectable to your children?
For me it was a grandfather. He was kind, peaceful, patient and funny. Most of all of the things that made him respectable however was this: He treated me like a person of equal worth. I remember this man as the one I respected more than anyone in my childhood years because of his actions. He talked softly to me, listened intently, cared about the content of my thoughts, remembered what I'd said, acted upon his promises, and taught me the joy of making other people happy. I never respected anyone as much as my grandfather in my childhood. So when I became a parent, my first promise to myself was this: I will train myself to raise my child like my grandfather raised me. I wanted to be respected by my child like my grandfather was respected by me, but mostly I wanted my child to be as happy with me and as enchanted by me as I was by my grandfather.

When my parents or my grandmother wanted to punish me, they'd yell, spank me, set me in a corner, take something away or ground me. I remember their punishments making me angry. I remember hating their actions and feeling they were not such great people at the time. It didn't discourage me from doing what I'd done wrong. It discouraged me from showing them my actions, from trusting them.
When my grandfather saw me acting out, he would never yell or spank me or take things away. He would look at me with sad eyes, acknowledge what I just did by telling me gently that what I did was wrong, and then shake his head in disappointment and walk away, leaving me to think. I respected him deeply... and so his disappointment was devastating to me. I would cry. I would break down and cry because I knew what I had done was wrong. Then I would think about what I had done, ask myself what I could do better, go and talk with my grandfather and get his help in understanding... In the end, I would know better than to repeat this misdeed. I would avoid it because I truly did not want to be a bad person, and I wanted my grandfather to respect me. I trusted that he could teach me to be a good person, where I did not trust my parents or my grandmother. Respect is key to a harmonious relationship with a child. Respect will allow you to guide a child gently and they will love you for being who you are.

Never Try to Force It
The worst mistakes my father always made in trying to make me behave were losing his temper and trying to force respect. He would demand it verbally. He would insist that I respect him because he was the parent and I was the child and that meant I had to respect him. This made me hate him. He was trying to force my emotions. He was trying to make me believe in something I did not believe in. He was hurting me. While he never understood that, he was forcing me to respect him less, not more. Be careful never to make the mistake of demanding respect from your children. You'll find that whether you try to demand respect or not, the respect you actually get will  never depend upon your empty threats or ill-tempered demands, but rather upon your performance as a parent. This is parenting discipline at its most basic, but it is a fundamental element in healthy parenting in general.
Good luck.


Arsh out.

Reflections on Society and Brainwashing

A post from my archives, Originally posted in September, 2008.

Reflections on Society and Brainwashing...

I was thinking today about the words that we use to describe ourselves... the labels that make up our quick-and-easy understanding of ourselves, our faiths, our ways, our lives. I am thoroughly appalled by such things. We try to say that we are this or that, but do we really think about what we are calling ourselves? The problem with parents today (well, not to suggest there's only one of them... but...) is that they teach their children what they want their children to be. They don't simply show their children a path to life and help guide them along their own way. Therefore, today, I came to the realization that I have always heard the word "heathen" as a derogatory term, and I grew rather irritated.

In my grandmother's vocabulary, "heathen" was a word best used to describe an unruly child, a little brat that ran around screaming and making a fool of himself, who could not be controlled or contained. I was often berated "sit down and stop acting like a little heathen!". As a student of linguistics, it is something I often find myself doing... stopping and thinking about the meaning of a word as I understand it, and asking myself why I think that word means what I think it means. In many years of doing this, I have come to realize that my parents gave me a very incorrect idea of what many words mean. Their usage of a word as a common adage, or as slang, completely deteriorated my understanding of the word's true meaning. I never understood etymology at all until many years after I had departed my parent's home and come to realize that most other people didn't use many words in the same way as I had been taught to use them. I came to be very familiar with etymology.com as it was a resource which I constantly used to improve my comprehension of REAL language, slowly replacing the backwards, bigoted language choices of my family, my now very disconnected family.

I realize that this is not, however, merely an isolated crime of one "good Christian" family, who were truly unfit for raising children, but rather an epidemic of society, in many ways. The problem comes from first, a lack of understanding of the manner in which language is formed, and secondly, the fact that people seem to consistently forget the manner in which language is learned best: immersion. No matter how many vocabulary drills we do, books we read, or tests we take, we learn language, first, best and most retentively by simply being immersed in conversations. We hear a word. We understand it's meaning via context, and we absorb that word into our psyche as a label for a certain feeling, item, or phenomenon and then we reciprocate that cycle by repeating that word in order to express our own ideals when the situation arrives. Therefore, if the word was used incorrectly when we first encountered it, we are likely to continue the cycle of incorrect speech. But let's look at a deeper level of this issue... What happens when, instead of using a word incorrectly, we apply an esoteric value to a word that already embodies a concrete meaning?

Take the word "heathen" for example. The word literally refers to those who were never converted from the Old Ways into the Christian, Jewish or Muslim religions. Then, since Christians especially disliked those people who refused to convert to their faith, the word was slung around in a derogatory meaning by people who were speaking badly of heathens. They would talk about how horrible those barbaric, uncivilized heathens were. This spiraled on and on for generations. Now, centuries of this sort of talk later... the word carries a negative connotation, and many children, having NEVER heard the word "heathen" used correctly, understand only that a "heathen" is a bad thing. Now... consider what happens when they enter the real world on their own and encounter good heathen folk. Their first instinct is to be wary or dislike this person because they proclaim to be "heathen". Imagine that they wish to befriend this person, or even come to know of, accept, or adopt their ways... They have a mental barrier to break through. They have to undo years of programming enforced by their family, society, and the very language that they speak, in order to move on and grow past the beliefs of a past generation.

This is, to me, inherently very wrong.

Heathen, is, of course, not the only word with which I have noticed this phenomenon. I never even heard the word "pagan" until I first encountered the pagan community. By that time, I had encountered, of course, only Wiccans. Thus, when Wiccans told me that they were "pagan", I came to understand the words to be interchangeable, and did not know at all that there were pagans who were not Wiccans. It was a few years before, even while studying with members of the pagan community, I realized that pagan and Wiccan did not always go hand in hand. I met pagans who claimed to not be Wiccan... then I was confused for some time before I finally got the notion to look the word up and then, only then, did I find out what "pagan" meant. I was horrified, of course, to realize that a pagan was, originally, merely "country folk". The word carried the connotation of a "witch" or practicioner of the old ways, because the country folk were too far removed from the big city concentrations of large populations for the Christian ministries to massively force-convert them, and so they remained witches, heathens, and practioners of old faiths. Thus, pagan came to be equated directly to those who were not Christian, and THEN, with further Christian hatred applied to those not of their faith, pagans became "bad" folks to hang around. If I told my parents I was hanging out with Pagans, I was immediately branded as "going bad" and definitely worshipping the devil.

But am I really surprised? Can any of us be surprised while living in a world where words become taboo, lose all meaning, and remain taboo when no one even remembers what they mean? "Hell" is a curse word, though it refers to the underworld in many religions. "Ass" is a curse word though it refers to an animal. "Damn" is a curse word, though it refers to a condemnation. Yet "dork" is perfectly alright for grade-school children to say, even though it refers to the penis of a whale. Well by my book, that ought be quite alright to say, but no more alright to call someone in meanness than to call them an ass. What is the difference?

If I hate you and express it with known taboo words, is it really any worse than expressing it with clever substitutions for these words? In my heart, the taboo words are preferable. At least then, we're being honest. The intentions, and not the expressions, are what we should guide our children to handle carefully.

Arsh