Any relationship you have in life can often be defined by the amount of time spent together. We often judge our relationships with parents, siblings, friends and colleagues according to this scale.
When you have children, the amount of time you spend with them quickly exceeds the amount of time you have spend with anyone except your own family.
From their first day, all they know is you.
Their model for human behaviour is everything you do and say. They are also adept at noticing and gathering information from what you do not say and do not do.
Your children will watch your behaviour, actively and passively, and learn how to react to every type of event. From their keen (and often undetected) observations, they will learn how to deal with feelings of tiredness and irritability, but also how you deal with stressful, scary or unexpected situations.
Your own actions in these types of events teach them what is expected in any similar situation they may face.
Raising children therefore, is an ongoing act of calibrating their nervous systems.
We all want to raise children who are firm, resilient, empathetic, and above all, able to calm themselves while remaining optimistic – but the groundwork for such a foundation of character starts with how we react to the things that happen to us in our own lives.
If we model patience, kindness and resolute optimism in our own reactions, we temper the nervous systems of our children to align with these values. Over a long enough period of time, children absorb the unspoken, implicit instruction we have modelled to them and apply it onto how they see the world and deal with their own challenges.
When they experience their own hardships and difficulties, they deal with them in the way we have calibrated them. They may understand that all situations may be overcome and that there is always a cause for hope, and at the very least gratitude that it could have been worse.
Keep before your eyes that your reactions to everything in your life serve to calibrate your children and how they deal with stress and difficulty.
Set course accordingly.