Remember, your children are watching.
Attitudes are more easily caught than taught,
You can never, not model.
Your actions speak louder than your words.
The statements above are just a few of the ways to express the notion that it is important to be a good role model for your children. There are many more. For almost everyone agrees that children in this day and age need positive role models.
While it would be difficult to argue against the importance of being a positive role model for children, we contend that it is not enough. Children don't need role models today as much as they need soul models. Our children need people in their lives who recognize that they are in this world, but not of this world. They need adults who can move past the ego-driven control styles exhibited by so many parents today and connect with them on a soul level.
Do you feel compelled to move past the limiting notion of being a role model and purposefully expand your reach to touch souls with your children on a regular basis? Do you want to add spiritual to the physical, mental, and emotional connection you already feel with your children? If so, the strategies below will help you do that. Read through the ideas presented and see which ones resonate on a deep level for you. Pay close attention to those. Those are the ones your soul is urging you to implement.
1. Help your children turn concept into experience. Your soul knows about generosity, love, caring, etc. It understands those concepts thoroughly. The soul doesn't need any more information about these concepts. What the soul desires is to experience generosity, loving, and caring. You may have a heart filled with love, but if you do nothing loving, the soul lacks the experience of loving.
Help you children to know themselves as loving by showing them how to do loving things. Encourage their generous acts so their souls can experience generosity. Help them to be caring by demonstrating and encouraging caring acts.
2. Share your feelings. Your soul communicates through feelings. The messages it sends come from the inside, out. Trust your feelings and allow your child access to the process of naming, describing, and using feelings to help make decisions. Honor you child's feelings and help them to trust those valuable messages that are the language of the soul.
3. Protect your child from noise pollution. The soul requires quiet times. Televisions blare in living rooms with no one present. The radio goes on as soon as people enter their cars. Malls, stores, and outdoor events create a constant barrage of music. The woods are increasingly filled with four-wheelers and motor bikes. Once peaceful lakes, now contain noisy speed boats as more and more people equate fun with speed and noise.
Go for quiet walks with your children. Have quiet time in your home and automobile. Inner listening requires silence. Help your child quiet his outer world to give room for his inner world to come forth.
4. Get back to nature. Direct contact with nature is essential to healthy spiritual development, not to mention the positive effects it has on physical and mental development. In this electronic age, our children are plugged in to everything but nature. They are missing contact with the beauty and silence of the natural world. Their souls ache from the negative effects of nature-deficit disorder.
Walk in the woods, camp, or bike on a nature trail. Go to the roof of your city apartment building if necessary and watch the stars and wonder. Chase fire flies, let snow flakes melt on your face, roll down a grassy knoll. Sit on a dock and dangle your feet in the water. Ride or groom a horse. Touch nature and let it touch you back down deep in your soul. Let your children see how much you enjoy it.
5. Get out of you mind. Rational thought and analyzing are of the mind. They are components of the mind/body connection, not the soul. Go to your heart for messages from the soul. What are your heartfelt desires? All creation begins with desire. Desire is the soul urging you what to do next.
Do not limit your children's desires. Encourage them to pay attention to those urges. It is their soul moving them forward. Help them find ways to work for their desires in responsible, caring ways.
6. Help you children make BE choices as well as DO choices. Doing is the job of body. It is always engaged in doing something. We make DO choices all the time. Playing catch, reading a story, praying, and putting a puzzle together are all examples of doing.
The job of the soul is being. We can be open-minded, considerate, friendly, happy, silly, or many other sates of being. When we decide how we want to be in a given situation and then actively be that way, it affects how we do whatever it is that we are doing. Help children bring how they are being into harmony with their souls and they will experience greater satisfaction in whatever they choose to do.
7. Help children learn to focus. The soul wants to be present and to be here now. If you talk on the phone while you are doing your taxes and simultaneously watch TV, you may think you are modeling for your children the valuable skill of multi-tasking. In actuality, you are demonstrating how to give important activities partial attention by diluting your focus and not being fully present for any of them.
8. Separate the deed from the doer. Children are not their behavior. They are not their report card. They are not their table manners. They are not their anger. Those behaviors are only their behaviors in this present moment. It is not who and what they are as human beings----a child of God.
"I like you and I don't like that behavior," are the words to use and the attitude to take to separate the deed from the doer. It tells the child that it is the behavior that is inappropriate. Love remains for the child while the behavior is disliked.
9. See it all as perfect. If your child is disrespectful of her grandparent, see that as the perfect way for her to communicate to you that she needs to learn more about respect for the elderly. See it as the perfect time to teach her a lesson on showing respect.
When your child leaves his toys out, that is the perfect time for him to learn about what happens when he makes that choice. If your teen turns off the alarm and goes back to sleep, it is the perfect opportunity to allow her to experience the natural consequences of being late for school.
You can see the parenting moment that you face today as awful or you can see it as perfect. To bump souls with your child, choose to see it as perfect.
10. See you child as a teacher. Your children are in your life as much so you can learn from them as they are so they can learn from you. Be open to the lessons your children offer you and honor them for helping you learn and grow.
When you use the ideas above do not be surprised if you begin to see your child as you have not seen her before. You may begin talking to your son with language patterns you have not used previously. You may hear your children with new ears. Not to be alarmed. Those are simply the joyous sights and sounds of souls touching.
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