Articles Adapted from Oh, Baby!
HAVING A BABY HELPS YOU DEVELOP AN AUTHENTIC SENSE OF SELF
Feeling complete is a wonderful sensation, and nothing contributes to this feeling quite like being a parent and helping your little one develop into a happy, loving, and capable person. Helping your child feel safe and emotionally secure is hugely important: It is the basis of self-esteem.
Self-esteem is the regard we hold for ourselves. It’s a composite picture of self-value, the worth we feel. This self-picture is important, in that it colors how willing and able we feel to confront each day’s challenges and do our best. Perhaps nothing affects our health, energy, peace of mind, the goals we set and achieve, the quality of our relationships, or our competence quite so much as the state of our self-esteem. The higher your self-esteem, the more resilient you are to problems and defeats. In the face of adversity, a positive sense of self serves as a powerful coping strategy for overcoming obstacles. It helps you compensate for weaknesses and setbacks and acts as a buffer, in that you are less likely to unduly magnify life’s challenges or victories. The worth you feel shows in your actions—the responsibility you take for the choices you make.
Your parenting actions are determining factors in helping your children feel safe, secure, and loving, but it’s a two-way street. Parents feel better about themselves when they see themselves as good parents. If parents raise their children with love and affection, help them believe in their abilities and fundamental goodness, allow them to experience consistent and benevolent acceptance, give them appropriate rules and reasonable expectations, allow them to learn from their mistakes without being shamed, and don’t assail them with ridicule, humiliation, or physical abuse as means of controlling them, then children have a good chance of internalizing those attitudes and acquiring the foundation for a healthy sense of self. So children have the best chance to grow up feeling safe, secure, wanted, and loved when they have parents who themselves feel safe, secure, wanted, and loved. And just as nothing better ensures that our children develop a healthy sense of self than having parents who themselves are whole, nothing contributes to our own positive sense of self more than helping our children achieve a durable sense of self for themselves.
Most parents would agree that parenting is central to the deep satisfaction and pain they experience during their lives. Senior citizens never wish for a little more time to make more money or express regret at not having acquired more material objects. Rather, they measure life’s success by the great joy and satisfaction they experienced in the precious and valuable moments spent with their children. For parents who truly experience this challenging role in a purposeful way, it is the most joyful and rewarding of their lifetime. Being a child’s hero gives meaning to who we are and directs us to be our best.
It’s rare for parents to say they have nothing of great worth in their lives. Most men and women hope one day to be parents or to help children learn and grow in some way. In fact, people who struggle with infertility often express the sorrow that something is missing from their lives. They’ll never feel complete, they say, until they become parents. And indeed, when their child finally arrives, their greatest yearning has been satisfied. They may not reach all their career or money goals, become rich and famous, or even marry well, but those desires all pale before the inborn need to be a mother or father.
Women, especially, long to hold babies in their arms. Many will go to almost any lengths to fulfill their need to have a child. If nature doesn’t cooperate, they will undergo lengthy and expensive fertility treatments, or pursue other options such as surrogacy or adoption. But men, too, feel the need to build a family. They are most fulfilled when wives and children grace their homes. They take pride in their families.
And when we grow as parents, we become better people. In the process of helping our children climb the ladder of childhood and learn attitudes and develop skills to surmount the challenges they find each step of the way, we discover much about ourselves. And we strive to be all we can be.
But to get to that point, we must also overcome the challenges of raising children, of which there are many. We cannot become our best selves without overcoming the obstacles of life. And there is nothing like raising children to put some obstacles in our way! Through parenting we discover our personal truths, and in so doing become authentic people.
Adapted from Oh, Baby! 7 Ways a Baby Will Change Your Life the First Year ©2006 by Bettie B. Youngs, Ph.D., Ed.D., Susan M. Heim, and Jennifer L. Youngs.
The book is available from your local bookstore, or directly from Hampton Roads Publishing Co. at www.hamptonroadspub.com or 1-800-766-8009.