It is such a nature of raising children that you kind of have to criticise. You want your kids to be better humans. You have this job to make them wonderful and you want to excel at it. Or so you think.
So, how do you actually trim them into neater, better them? You criticise of course. I was shocked how many years it took me to understand that most of my inner struggle and disbelief in my own power of self was coming from that “trying to make me better human” criticism. I was either (and still am) never enough or too much to my mom all the time. She could never ever praise me for what I was. This sense of not being seen, loved and appreciated for who I really was, destroyed my sense of self detrimentally. “Who I am” was gradually and permanently replaced by “who I am supposed to be for others”. It was not until maybe around 40 years of age that I realised that all the time I try to be what others want me to.
It took me much time (still struggling) to master stopping myself halfway in almost every thought or action to look inward and ask myself: is it really me who wants to do this?
As a parent we have to criticise but. Let us keep asking ourselves if this criticism is really necessary, even if so, let us make it to the bare minimum. And finally let our praise for our kids for whom they are hugely out-weight the criticism of how we want them to be.
