Parenting Blog

Guest Blog by Dr. Jim Taylor
Author of Positive Pushing

Listen to Dr. Jim Taylor live on Dr. Laura Markham's radio show!

Wednesday January 21
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An essential message I want to convey in Positive Pushing is the need for you to play a deliberate and vigorous role in raising your child. This emphasis requires that you actively guide your child in ways that will encourage his positive development. This message means that you need to thoughtfully explore the values, beliefs, and attitudes that guide your life and you make a conscious decision of how you want to raise your child.

The philosophy and approach that I advocate in Positive Pushing is aimed at helping you fulfill three essential goals. Everything you do with your child needs to be in his or her best interest; must promote his or her achievement, happiness, and healthy growth into a joyful and vital adult; and finally, must foster a strong and loving relationship between you and your child.

About Successful Achievers

Parents who want their children to achieve something called “success” may find that this goal conflicts with their desire for their children to also become happy. Success, as frequently defined by our society emphasizes wealth and social status, but is often at odds with the values of satisfaction, contentment, and happiness. A perusal of the psychology section of any bookstore shows that the goal of achieving success by itself is inadequate. As Dr. Jack Wetter, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist, observes, “On the one side, you’ve got books on how to raise achieving, successful children. And across from that, you’ve got books for adults on how to overcome your depression and increase your self-esteem.”

The purpose—and the theme—of Positive Pushing is to guide you in raising your child to be a successful achiever. Successful achievers are distinguished from those who simply achieve success in that, for successful achievers, success and happiness are synonymous. Not only do they not view success and happiness as mutually exclusive, parents of successful achievers see them as necessarily mutually inclusive. Success without happiness is not success at all.

Implicit in the notion of successful achievers is that a necessary part of success and happiness is the internalization by children of universally-held values such as respect, consideration, kindness, generosity, fairness, altruism, integrity, honesty, interdependence, and compassion. Children cannot become successful achievers unless they adopt and live by these essential life-enriching values.

The development of successful achievers comes from fostering the Three Pillars of Successful Achievers: self-esteem, ownership, and emotional mastery. These three areas provide the foundation for raising children who are successful, happy, and who possess life-affirming values. The goal of Positive Pushing is to show you how to raise your child on these three pillars so that their childhood development will lead to lives of success and happiness.

First Pillar: Self-Esteem

Self-esteem has been perhaps the most misunderstood and poorly used developmental area in recent generations. In the last few decades, parents were led to believe that self-esteem developed if a child felt loved and valued. This belief caused parents to shower their children with love, encouragement, and support regardless of what their children actually did.

Yet this “unconditional love” is only one half of the self-esteem equation. The second part is that children need to develop a sense of competence and mastery over their world. Most basically, children must learn that their actions matter, that their actions have consequences. Since the 1970’s, parents have often neglected to provide their children with this essential component of self-esteem.

Your child will develop high self-esteem from receiving appropriate love, encouragement, and support, but also from the sense of competence he develops from opportunities you give him to learn and use skills in the pursuit of achievement. High self-esteem also acts as the foundation for the other two pillars that form the essence of successful achievers.

Second Pillar: Ownership

Another mistake that parents have often made in trying to develop high self-esteem in their children was to provide them with too much love, encouragement, and support. By investing so much of their own self-esteem in their child’s efforts, parents were, in effect, assuming ownership of their child’s achievements. Though these efforts were often well-intentioned, the effect was that children felt no sense of connectedness and responsibility for their efforts. The children end up being unable to say, “I’m doing this because I want to.”

Children need to gain a sense of ownership of their life’s interests, efforts, and achievements. This second pillar, ownership, means that they engage in an activity out of an enduring love for it and an internally-derived determination to do their very best. This ownership also provides them with an immense source of gratification and joy from their efforts that further motivates them to strive higher in their achievement activities.

Third Pillar: Emotional Mastery

The third pillar of successful achievers, emotional mastery, is perhaps the most neglected aspect of a child’s development. Parents have been led to believe that letting their children experience negative emotions such as frustration, anger, and sadness will harm them. Based on this belief, parents have felt the need to protect their children from feeling badly. They rationalize failure, distract children from deeply experiencing emotions, try to placate negative emotions, and create artificial positive emotions.

Yet, parents who protect their children from their emotions are actually interfering with their children’s emotional growth. These children end up never learning how to effectively deal with their emotions and enter adulthood ill-equipped for its emotional demands. Only by being allowed to experience emotions are children able to figure out what emotions they are feeling, what the emotions mean to them, and how they can manage them effectively.

This third pillar explains that you will want to give your child opportunities to experience emotions fully—both positive and negative—and provide her with guidance to understand and gain mastery over her emotional life. Children who do not develop emotionally can still achieve success, but the price they pay is often discontentment and unhappiness in their successes. Emotional mastery enables children to not only become successful, but also to find satisfaction and joy in their efforts.