What Do You Really Want for Your Children?

INTRODUCTION

There are many provocative quotations about the raising of children, none of which has ever struck me with more force than the words of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester back in the seventeenth century. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. There is a powerful amount of truth in that statement. Nothing renders us less all-knowing than having the responsibility of raising children on a daily basis. It is with these words in mind that I have written the book you hold in your hand. I have no theories for you. I offer you my own common-sense applications, which have come from my experiences with children, from my contact with thousands of skillful parents, from being around children all my life, and from my great love for them.

When I was teaching at St. John’s University in New York many years ago, and my daughter was only three years old, her friends would knock on the door and ask politely of my wife, Can Wayne come out and play? Please? There I was, a thirty-year-old college professor, playing horsey and chasing the little ones around the block. At parties when all of the adults would congregate in a smoke-filled room, drinking cocktails, I was often off playing games with the children. I have been blessed with beautiful children and stepchildren of my own. I can honestly say that I have often preferred the company of children to adults, that I love to wrestle, tease, play, and be around, children of all ages.

When I was traveling in Europe, I once played soccer with a group of non-English-speaking children in a mountain village in Switzerland. I spent several exhausting hours in the company of twenty young children, and though we could not communicate with words, there was a mutual sharing and love, a respect and perfect enjoyment that transcended the need for a verbal language. The laughter, the determination, the wondrous excitement for living that unspoiled children share is a universal trait.

In the crowded train stations of Japan and Hong Kong I played with Oriental children, getting them to laugh and squeal with delight over a game of finger wrestling, or who can make the funniest face. In Germany, I taught an entire neighborhood of tiny tykes, all screeching in delight, how to catch and throw an American Frisbee. When you have a love affair with children, it matters little what language they speak. The language of love is so powerful that the words become unnecessary. In writing this book I have been able to strongly identify with the words of Carl Jung, a brilliant contributor to the field of human awareness, when he said:

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me.

My strong love and affection for young people has owned me all of my life; it was only a matter of time before I decided to write about this wonderful love affair with the children of the world.

My books have all been a part of this participatory destiny that I allude to in the previous paragraph. Your Erroneous Zones was my effort to teach everyone the common sense of managing one’s own emotions, and Pulling Your Own Strings was a natural follow-up on how to deal more effectively with others who would attempt to victimize you in any way. The Sky’s the Limit was an extension of these principles. It offered ideas for going beyond simply managing one’s own emotions and dealing more effectively with others, into the area of no-limit living—that is, living the highest functioning life possible for a human being based upon the ability to choose one’s own greatness. In Gifts from Eykis, I wrote my parable for our time, a story of one woman from another world who gives us the reality-only wisdom and simple truths to apply to our own personal lives, and to the healing of our planet. It was inevitable that I write What Do You Really Want for Your Children? It is the natural way to go for me. This book offers the same basic no-nonsense approach to the most important task facing all of us: the raising of children in such a way as to leave our world in the hands of people who can not only manage it and themselves effectively, but who can finally make this world a place of peace and love forever.

As I wrote this book I persistently kept my mind focused on being helpful and practical instead of theoretical. I want you to be able to apply today what you are reading in these pages. As a professional counselor I always knew precisely what formula it took to get people to change. First, I would get people to identify what it was that they were doing which could be labeled self-defeating, to simply identify the behaviors that were not working for them. Second, I would attempt to get them to see the payoffs, or the neurotic dividends, for these self-destructive behaviors. Finally, we would attempt to come up with intelligent, practical, and implementable new behaviors to help them to change. That is the essence of effective counseling, and it is the formula that I have used in writing this book. First, identify what it is that you may be doing in a given area of child rearing. Then look at your payoffs for continuing to treat your children this way. Finally, find out how to use new techniques that just might bring about your desired result.

I have not written a standard book about the raising of children. All of the concepts, ideas, strategies, techniques, or whatever you choose to call them apply to all ages and all situations involving children. They are universal to the helping of young people to become independent, no-limit people.

Throughout the pages of this book I will be presenting the specific skill areas of no-limit living. These areas fall almost exclusively in the how you feel domain. I will emphasize those that will carry you and your children through any troublesome situation. If you cannot figure out how to adjust your carburetor, at least you can look it up or take it to a carburetor expert. But, if you find yourself immobilized by your out-of-control anger, or your child is hopelessly nervous, there is no instruction manual on anger control, nor is there a nervous system repair garage available. The answers must come from within you and within your child. The key to being a no-limit person has very little to do with mastering a set of cognitive skills. Instead, it has almost everything to do with knowing how to be at the controls of your own emotions. You and your children become to your own life as a great painter is to his masterpiece, shaping, shading, designing as you choose.

I have written this book to help you out now. You will not find neat little categories for what to do at every stage of development, because your child is unique now, and therefore resists compartmentalization. I want to help you now to get started on turning the direction from many limits to no limits. Whether you are a parent, grandparent, teacher, neighbor, caretaker, stepparent, friend, minister, counselor, social worker, or any other caring person who wants to help young people, I want you to be able to use this book now. I wrote it believing that you can pick it up today, regardless of whether you are expecting your first child, or are parents of six teenagers, or anyplace in between. I never intended to write a book about starting from the beginning, because today is the only day you have, and your children are precisely the age they are, and you must deal with that particular reality. I do not believe that you must start them out in a certain way, and if you do not, then it is too late once they pass through a particular developmental stage. I know that it is possible to change at any given moment, regardless of one’s previous history. I am convinced that you can begin right now on a course of no-limit parenting, and change your child’s life beginning right now. I have changed self-defeating behavior patterns in myself by simply making the decision to do so, and by exercising the will and self-determination to make the decision stick. So, too, can you apply any of the principles in this book and make them work, if you have the will to work with children in a new light.

There have been books written on the subjects of single parenting, children of divorce, the preteen, guilt and parenting, infancy, you and your teenager, menopause parenting, and every conceivable subcategory you can think of. I had one single objective in mind when writing this book. How can I help you, regardless of your current situation, now, to influence your children in a positive no-limit way, to raise them to become all that you want for them? I have kept uppermost in mind the need to be specific, to use concrete examples, and to make it practical rather than theoretical. You will find some duplication in the pages of this book. Many times a point made in one chapter on creativity will apply equally in the area of discipline or promoting a positive self-image. Rather than attempting to disguise it, I deliberately repeated the principle when it seemed to be called for in my writing.

In order to help bring about positive results with children—or with anyone, for that matter—you must repeat, repeat, and repeat again. You must constantly reiterate something until it becomes a positive habit. When you think about it, that is precisely the way you learned self-defeating habits, by constant repetition. So when you see an example or a principle reused later on in the book, try not to think of it as a writer’s repetition, but simply as a reminder, right here where you are reading, that the same principle that applied in an earlier section applies here as well. I have done it deliberately to reinforce the need as it arose in my writing. I did not edit out all the duplication, because I believe in it and I know it is necessary in order to help you to make these techniques work for you. Just as children do not ever fit into neat little categories as many who have written about the two-year-old, the preadolescent, or the adolescent might have you believe, neither do the principles of parenting fit into tightly wrapped packages. There is much overlap in the various wants that I have used to title the ten chapters of this book, and I will not pretend that something said in one place must never be repeated in another. It simply does not come out that way in reality, and it did not come out that way in writing about that reality either.

The book you are holding evolved in very much the way a young child evolves into adulthood. In the early chapters I was very careful to guide you through the pages, taking you step by step, using clinical examples. I assumed that you could not be left alone and that you needed constant supervision. As I wrote, I became more personal, sharing private stories, using personal examples, and straying from clinical case studies into more everyday human situations. I was letting you, the reader, in on my beliefs and strategies. I kept it specific, but not at all nurturing, simply offering you my strong beliefs and applications on this glorious subject of raising no-limit children. In the later stages I asked you to stretch more, much as you might ask such stretching of your adolescent. I took on the subjects of wellness, creativity, higher needs, and a sense of purpose, almost as if you were now in an advanced stage of your parenting development.

I went beyond simply asking you to help your own child, to a plea for you to help all of the children everywhere as well. I can see this progression in the book, and rather than editing it out, I have left it as I wrote it: from infancy, through the toddler years, into preadolescence and the teenage years, and finally into adulthood. The same evolution that your children must traverse whether they like it or not, so too did I traverse as I wrote about this vital subject. You will realize this progression in the book.

In the past few years I have received thousands of letters from people who genuinely care about children. I want to share a portion of three of those letters from people who asked me to keep in mind some important truths while writing this very book. First, Bonnie Kippen, from Carney’s Point, New Jersey, wrote to me, saying:

Dear Dr. Dyer:

While reading Your Erroneous Zones I realized exactly what I want to do. I want to see my three smallest children—ages eight, seven, and six—educated without all the approval-seeking brainwashing that myself and various schools have used to all but destroy my fourteen-year-old. The middle girl, age eight, is already on her way in the same direction. I’ve watched them all start out bright and eager, enjoying preschool and kindergarten as a satisfactory experience, only to be pressured into conformity. One is so indoctrinated that her teacher describes her as a sweet child and a good influence on the class. Horrors! My seven-year-old son resisted in first grade and now, this obviously gifted, secretly frustrated treasure has been branded as troubled and a proverbial handful. The youngest, almost six, was consistently criticized for being a disruption because she tried to do things that were not part of the day’s lesson or unrelated to what we must accomplish in kindergarten. She was the most resistant and stubborn about her opinions, but her teacher couldn’t accept it when I suggested that the child might have an opinion. The teacher told me that kindergarten children are too young to have formed any opinions about anything and that even if they did it wouldn’t matter because the school system knew the best way to structure her education. Do you know of anywhere that I can get them educated without all the nonsense? Is there maybe an experimental school somewhere that applies the sort of freedom and self-love techniques that you espouse in combination with sound academic goals to develop not only well-educated but also well-adjusted students?

Thank you,

Bonnie Kippen

Bonnie’s concerns as a parent and her very real determination to keep her children from becoming indoctrinated into sameness by approval-seeking brainwashing was a real inspiration for my writing.

Several months later, I spoke to a group of teachers on Long Island, as a keynoter for the opening day program. A teacher, Marilyn Chiaramonte, of Rockville Centre, New York, wrote to me afterward. Her letter said in part:

Please repeat in your parenting book ad nauseam the importance of loving the child for himself and not for what we expect him to be. I see so many damaged, hurt, scarred, walled egos in my classes every term that I spend most of the term just loving and accepting these kids, most of whom are truly beautiful human beings and just do not believe it because they’ve never been told. You can knock down an inflated ego with a few well-placed words. But it takes a lifetime to boost up an ego that’s broken by well-meaning parents who don’t want to spoil the child.

I hope your presentation touched many of the teachers at Lawrence who’ve sort of given up on teaching, maybe even life. I can think of no other way to better start the school year. I look forward to the publication of your parenting book and will probably use it in my parenting classes.

I kept your words in mind, Marilyn, as I wrote this book, and I too feel many of the concerns you have expressed in your thoughtful letter.

Then, as I was putting the finishing touches on this manuscript, a letter came to me from a woman in Seattle. Her name is Chloe Robinson. She had written to me previously, after hearing me speak several months earlier. This time she sent me the following letter, which she had sent to her children and her grandchildren. I have included it here in its entirety, because I believe it gives a powerful message to all of us who care about children and it helps to answer the question that is the title of this book, What Do You Really Want for Your Children?

To My Children and Grandchildren,

As the year comes to a close, I want to tell each of you how much I love you and how special you are to me.

In this existence that we call life, I have learned two things: that each of us is special and unique in the universe and that love is the most powerful device that we have in our lives.

Our contribution to this planet should be that of becoming all that we can become as a person and allowing each and every other person that same privilege. If we do this through love and caring and by being a nonjudgmental person, when we leave this place, as we all will, it will be better because of our having been here.

Our mission in life should be to be as happy and as positive as we can possibly be. It is our God-given right, and unless we are truly happy with ourselves and love ourselves as the unique and special individuals that we are, we can never totally give of ourselves to others and make this planet the beautiful, loving, and peaceful place that we would wish it to be.

Self-love is not selfish. It is the most positive and perfect way that you can thank God for your life. If you love yourself and know that you are perfect in God’s eyes, then you will be able to radiate this message to others and reinforce in them that they, too, are perfect. That is the only way that everyone can achieve this elusive thing that we call happiness.

Happiness, in itself, does not exist. It is an illusion. Only by being happy within ourselves can we find it. If you search the world until you die, you will never find it. You will not find it in material things, excitement, other people, wishing for it, buying it, or by any other means. It is totally personal and comes from within.

The wonderful thing is that it is there for everyone, and no matter who you are or what your circumstances, you must realize that it is your gift. You are entitled to it, and there are no strings attached. You must never depend on another person to give you happiness; that places too much of a burden on both of you. If you are truly happy inside yourself and allow the other person that same right, then you automatically bring happiness to each other without even trying, and it is a bonus because it is not expected or anticipated…it just is.

Our responsibility to this planet, ourselves, and others is to be as positive as we can possibly be. This does not mean being unrealistic; it only means that no matter what the circumstances and how they affect us, we maintain our inner calm, our unwavering knowledge that we are unique and that there is nothing that can shake our belief in ourselves if we don’t allow it to.

We must face each situation in our lives with dignity and love and allow the other person that same right.

Life is not a game of there having to be a winner and a loser. We are all winners. Only when we perceive ourselves or others as winners or losers do we place a label on something that isn’t really there. Let yourself be a winner in life and allow the other person to be a winner too. In that way, everyone wins.

We are each unique from the day of birth. Small children need the protection of their parents until they are old enough to take care of themselves physically, but we should, from the day each baby is born, recognize that a baby is a human being, exactly as we are, in a tiny body. They are not apprentice people.

Life is wonderful and beautiful; God intended it to be that way. It is only through our own attitudes about ourselves and others that we allow it to become less than perfect.

Our bodies are made up of billions of cells, and in order for us to maintain perfect health, each of these cells must operate at its optimum level. If we have sick or weak cells, then our healthy cells must work harder to counteract this negative situation so that the body as a whole can be healthy.

Our planet is like a body, and each of us is one of the cells. It is our responsibility to this body that we call our planet to be a healthy, happy cell that radiates nothing but goodness and positiveness. Only in this way can we help counteract the sick or weak cells and make our world perfect and beautiful in every way. There is no room for negative thinking and selfishness. Only by being the best that we can be, and allowing others the same right, can this be accomplished.

We must each strive to become a loving, nonjudgmental person and to give every other person, no matter how much he or she differs from us in looks, behavior, or beliefs, the right to also become a loving, nonjudgmental person. This is the only way our planet will survive.

I expect to live a long and fulfilling life and to continue to grow and learn, but if I were to be gone tomorrow, this is what I would like to leave as my message to each of you.

I love each of you and accept you exactly as you are. I want and expect nothing more from you than your right to be happy and fulfilled as a unique person. I, in turn, will try to become the very best person I can be so that you will never have to look on me as a burden or feel any responsibility for me other than sharing with me your love and your self as a person if you so choose.

There is nothing that you will ever do that will disappoint me or make me love you less than I do. You have my unconditional love and the sure knowledge that this will never change. We are all on our own paths even though our lives are intertwined with each other’s.

All I hope for and expect from you is that you exercise your God-given right to be happy and become the very best that you can become and allow that same right to everyone else with no reservations or conditions.

Au aloha oe nui loa [I love you very much].

Aloha [Love],

Makuahine a Tutu Koloe

[Mother and Grandma Chloe]

I trust that you will find this book useful from the opening pages through the letter that is the appendix. Some time ago my mother, to whom this book is partially dedicated, wrote me the following poem. It too summarizes beautifully the feeling I want to convey as you begin reading this book, of which I am so proud.

WAYNE

A mother can but guide…

then step aside—I knew

I could not say, "This is the way

that you should go."

For I could not foresee

what paths might beckon you

to unimagined heights

that I might never know.

Yet, always in my heart

I realized

That you would touch a star…

I’m not surprised!

—Hazel Dyer

You can help your own children to touch their own stars if you follow that important advice. Guide, then step aside. It is the message of this book. It is your own destiny as a caring person who genuinely loves all those little stars.

1

WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING FOR YOUR CHILDREN?

There is no wealth but life.

—JOHN RUSKIN

Just for the fun of it, take a poll of all the parents you know, asking them the question that I have used as the title of this very first chapter: What do you want more than anything for your children? While you are at it, ask yourself and your spouse (if you have one) the very same question and see what you discover as you begin reading this book. While you may receive a wide variety of responses, I suggest that if you categorize the answers, you will find that the most significant responses gravitate around a central theme.

In my experience, when asking parents this leading question, and giving them time to consider the importance of such a profound question, the answers tend toward the ones you will find in the following list.

I want my children to be happy, and free from hang-ups in life.

I want them to know how to enjoy life and appreciate every day as a miracle.

I want them to feel successful and significant as people regardless of what they do.

I want them to have positive feelings about themselves and about life.

I want them to grow up knowing how to avoid having the inevitable problems defeat them in any way.

I want them to avoid being depressed and miserable.

I want them to avoid growing up to be neurotic.

I want them to have a strong sense of inner peace that will sustain them through difficult times.

I want them to value the now: to take pleasure in life’s journey, avoiding overemphasis on a destination.

I want them to know that they are the designers of their lives, that they have the power to choose and change their lives.

I want them to be sensitive and responsible to, and have a reverence for, nature and humanity.

I want them to find and explore their potential and feel satisfied and challenged with a purpose in life.

I want them to feel loved and loving.

I want them to find the opportunities that are hidden in life’s inevitable painful experiences.

I want them to be on friendly terms with health—physically and mentally.

These are the typical answers, condensed into a few simple sentences, that I have received in response to this question. Parents do not seem to be obsessed with having their children become rich and famous, or with wanting them to have problem-free lives. They are not absolutely determined that their children should have idyllic jobs, a beautiful home, a marriage to a perfect 10, and a storybook family life as portrayed on television and in the movies. Parents seem to be realistic in their goals for their children. They know that things will not bring happiness, and they do not want to teach their children to accumulate things in a search for happiness. We all seem to have come to the realization in recent years that acquisitions, position in life, accumulation of wealth, and some of the more traditional barometers of a successful life are no longer appropriate. We have all heard too many stories of successful people who are addicted to tranquilizers, who must visit their shrinks regularly, who view depression as only normal, who consider suicide as a solution to life’s problems, or who are so busy pursuing more that they have no time for enjoying life.

People have become wary of those undesirable accompaniments to success, and want their children to develop instead a kind of serenity and happiness that will carry them through even the toughest of times. I am quite confident that you want your children to grow into contented, highly functioning, no-limit adults who will be able to handle all of life’s difficulties without allowing themselves to be so overwhelmed by them that they are either defeated in some way, or so badly bruised that they come to rely on external measures such as pills, therapy, or even surgery to cope with life. In short, you want your kids to grow up to be no-limit people in every single aspect of their lives, and to enjoy life without developing a sour attitude or a defeatist posture.

You want them to be positive about their lives, rather than grumblers. You want them to feel successful rather than having some external factor determine their degree of success.

THE ABILITY TO ENJOY LIFE

Think for a moment about the greatest priority in life. Imagine for yourself, and for your children, that you were all bequeathed the ability to enjoy life regardless of the circumstances around you. If someone abandoned you, nevertheless you would still know how to enjoy life. If you were faced with a serious illness or about to go through a difficult tax audit, you would still be able to enjoy life. Disappointments would come and go, yet because of your inherited gift, you would always know how to enjoy life. Given this imaginary ability, it would be impossible for you to ever be a burden to anyone else; therefore, you would be as unselfish as is humanly possible. Naturally, if you could always enjoy life, you wouldn’t have a set of expectations for other people to provide enjoyment for you, regardless of what they chose at any given moment. What a miraculous gift this ability to enjoy life at all times would be.

You do have this capacity! It need not exist only in your imagination. You can make it very real for yourself and inspire this marvelous quality in your children. After reviewing your objectives for your children and considering all the possibilities of things you might provide for them, it almost always boils down to this one wish: I would love for my children to always have the ability to enjoy life. If this sentence describes what you would like to provide for your children, you can make it a priority beginning today. If you offer this wonderful gift to your children, and give it to yourself at the same time, your reward will be children that grow and mature into the highest-level functioning human beings on our globe. The people who genuinely make a difference in the world are those who are not preoccupied with their own personal happiness, but who instead simply take it for granted as a precondition of their humanity. The people who feel successful, and in fact achieve at the highest levels, are those who are able to ignore the need to have someone provide them with happiness injections. The truest definition that I know of a no-limit person is simply a person who knows how to enjoy life, especially when those around him are going mad.

Assuming that most parents want to cultivate this kind of a general attitude of enjoying life for their children, then what goes wrong between what we genuinely wish to provide our children and the reality we face each day? Why are there so many adults and young adults popping tranquilizers in order to make it through the day? (Approximately 100 million prescriptions for Valium and Librium are filled annually in the United States alone.) Why do we need to take pills to go to sleep, to stay awake, to relieve tension, to give us energy, to send away miseries, to slow us down, to speed us up, and on and on? Why are so many people filled with stress? Why do suicide rates continue to rise, especially among young people, and why are visits to shrinks a way of life? Why such widespread use of drugs and alcohol to get high? Why so much anger and hostility in our world? Why do people resort to desperate measures in order to be heard? If we want children to be able to enjoy life, then where have all these desperately unhappy people come from? Why has hate become more rampant than love? Why are so many people living in fear in the supposed safety of their own homes? Why do so many children become drug addicts, criminals, cult followers—or, at best, impolite and inconsiderate to strangers?

The fact is that most of us do not know how to go about helping children to learn how to enjoy life because we have not learned that simple secret ourselves. We cannot teach what we do not know. We go on and on in the same vicious cycle that was handed to us, and our own children become the victims of our parental ignorance. We often think that we know what it is that constitutes a successful person, and we spend time browbeating our young people into submissively becoming what we think they should become. We look at our own errors and vow to avoid their repetition in our children. We assume that having lived longer gives us wisdom that a young person should welcome. And nothing could be further from the truth. Learning how to enjoy life is an attitude. It is a central belief system that we either learn or we don’t. We often forget this, or we don’t have this inner conviction ourselves, and consequently we cannot provide it for our young people. A central premise of this book, and of all that I have ever written, is that you must be able to model what you are attempting to teach.

BEING AN EXAMPLE

Imagine going to your dentist and having him give you a lecture on the importance of oral hygiene, while all the time smiling at you through rotting front teeth. Or, visualize yourself talking to your doctor and having him tell you about the evils of nicotine addiction while blowing cigarette smoke in your face. Your initial reaction would be This person is a phony. The same kind of logic applies to the teaching of attitudes about life. If your goal is to assist children in developing an appreciation for life, and the ability to always enjoy life, then you must begin this task by first working on yourself and modeling this kind of an attitude in all of your interactions.

If you are constantly putting yourself down, living on a day-to-day basis with low self-respect, and literally demonstrating to children that you do not think very highly of yourself, then you are hardly in a position to help any child raise his self-esteem. YOU MUST LIVE BY EXAMPLE! It is essential to show children a portrait of a person who has self-respect if you want it to rub off on them. It is important that you have your own life together if you are going to provide an authentic example for children.

There is no better answer to a child’s negative attitude than a positive example. You can look up the answers in all the baby books ever written, but to a child who has no motivation, there is no better answer than a motivated person. The angry child is best answered by a calm person. The prejudiced child is best answered by a tolerant loving person. The lackadaisical child is best encouraged by an enthusiastic person. While all of your attributes are not necessarily going to rub off on children, the best place to begin in the business of raising children to become all that they can become, is by doing the same for yourself, and proudly displaying this example wherever possible.

Even if you are not a person who has conquered your own erroneous zones, and you see yourself as having a great deal of work to do, you can begin to work on the comments you make in front of children. For example, you can try to eradicate any and all sentences that reflect your own inability to enjoy life. Eliminate such mutterings as the following:

It’s so depressing—we can never get ahead.

Things never seem to work out for us.

How can I ever enjoy myself with all the troubles you cause me?

Some people have all the luck.

Life is a penalty box.

When you work each day at eliminating the kinds of sentences that reflect an inability to enjoy life, you will be providing an example, a real live personal model, of at least one person who is not ever going to be defeated by life. New sentences which you can practice each and every day, especially when things do not seem to be going as you would like them to be, and even if you do not believe them yet, include:

It’s just a minor setback. We’ll get over it real fast.

We can find something positive in this for all of us.

Your troubles are your own, and I’m not going to get depressed because of them.

People make their own luck.

Life is a banquet.

In each of the five sentences above, you can see the difference between a parent who is constantly providing a pessimistic example and one who looks at the bright side in the same situations. If you want your children to develop the ability to enjoy life at all times, and you see a lot of negative attitudes creeping into their personalities, begin the task of reversing those attitudes by first looking at yourself. You will not be able to eliminate all self-defeating behaviors and attitudes in children by simply changing yourself and doing nothing more, but you can make a huge dent in that negative armor by giving children a consistent example of one person who refuses to be one of life’s victims.

As you think about providing a live example of a person who knows how to enjoy life, not only for your children’s sake, but for your own as well, remind yourself about what really counts in life. Far too often we place an extreme value on learning rules, obtaining knowledge, achievement, acquisitions, and external rewards, such as a career slot and the ability to make money. All too often we have modeled these as the most important values a person can possess, at the expense of the far more consequential qualities of simply being able to be happy.

WHAT YOU KNOW VS. HOW YOU FEEL

At any given moment in your life, what is more important: what you know or how you feel? It is impossible to separate them entirely, but generally speaking, what is it that has priority, your knowledge or your feelings?

We are all aware that when we feel bad we become less effective and have difficulty performing our duties effectively until we somehow correct the bad feelings we are experiencing. Feelings, or emotions, are the most significant side to our lives, yet we almost totally ignore them as we overemphasize the acquisition of knowledge in both our homes and our schools. Educators have faced this dilemma for centuries. The affective (feelings) versus the cognitive (knowledge) approach is the technical label for the controversy as it applies to education. Schools spend better than 95 percent of their funds and energy on the cognitive side. Parents spend almost the same amount of their energy and time in developing the cognitive domain, and we all know in our hearts that our emotions take precedence in virtually all of life’s important situations.

Learning to manage our own emotions, to have self-confidence and self-esteem, to avoid being depressed, afraid, stressful, anxious, worried, guilty, jealous, shy, and the like are primary skills that no-limit people possess. These skill areas in the affective domain are absolutely essential to a full and happy life, the kind of life that allows you to always appreciate and enjoy it, yet we ignore the affective skills, dismissing them as trivial or things that we should already know. Few of us can really manage our own emotions, and even fewer of us are capable of teaching our children how to avoid the pitfalls of an ineffective education in the affective domain.

People who have nervous breakdowns do not suffer from a poor education. Often they are quite capable of creating or solving complex rhyming schemes of esoteric poetry. People who take pills to cope with life have often mastered quadratic equations. Shy people often score in the highest percentiles in reading and writing skills. People who lack love and confidence are quite capable of winning a spelling bee. Angry, hostile people can usually master the requirements of their jobs and even figure out the complex circuitry in electronic equipment. Fearful people are usually able to add and subtract, and often have perfect school attendance records. You begin to see that the really important skills are ignored in the name of acquiring an education. I strongly believe in learning cognitive skills; the more you know in all areas, the better are your chances of being a no-limit person throughout your life.

The principal goal of parenting is teaching children to become their own parents. You want children to rely on their own inner signals, to be able to think for themselves, to avoid costly emotional letdowns, and to know that they have the skills and the ability to use them, to lead happy and fulfilled lives without the need to consult you forever. You are to be their guide for a while, and then, you will enjoy watching them take off on their own. To accomplish this, you will want to be well versed in the specifics of no-limit living, and to be helpful in allowing children to make choices and acquire as many cognitive skills as they desire, while always possessing the abilities to be at mastery in the affective areas as well.

In this affective domain, where how I feel is of paramount importance, there are many specifics as well. They may not categorize as neatly as addition or sentence diagramming, but they are easily as significant. And, best of all, when you and your children get these qualities of no-limit living down pat, you will never ever forget them. In fact, you will take them with you wherever you go, and in every single task you undertake throughout your life, whether you are cleaning out your closet, working in the garden, changing a diaper, mending a dress, appearing in traffic court, or making love. These are tools that you take with you to all jobs and all of life’s experiences. And you need not ignore them any longer.

THE AFFECTIVE DOMAIN

A major premise of this book is that you want children to live happy, neurosis-free lives. You want to help them to internalize specific skills and attitudes that will serve them throughout their lives in such a way that they will know how to live at mastery. You also start with the awareness that they are not going to learn these skills and attitudes in a classroom. Schools do not have a curriculum for developing no-limit people; in fact, they often work in opposition to these objectives. Children will have to acquire their no-limit beliefs out there in the real world. Herman Melville, the well-known nineteenth-century author of Moby-Dick, whose works most of us have been required to read at one time or another, said it this way: A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. A clever way of saying that one learns by doing, and not by attending lectures in a prestigious university. Your children will need a whale ship of their own if they are going to learn to navigate their own emotional destiny.

Living fully in the how I feel realm is extremely rewarding. In this affective domain, there are no rules to memorize, no examinations to take, no grades that appear on a report card. The rewards are a happy, fulfilled life regardless of what tasks you undertake. The rules are flexible and varied, and the examinations are the ways in which you handle your everyday real-life situations. This is not classroom education for an artificial environment, or a method for making a lot of money later in life. In this part of your life, each and every setting, each and every human being you encounter, each moment of life is an opportunity to demonstrate your skills and abilities. This is the realm of your being in which you use your knowledge and skills all the time; you need not wait until you are working in the marketplace to see why you studied a specific subject. Each and every day of your life you will see the beautifully rewarding reasons why you practiced so hard in learning these skills and attitudes.

Our goals, then, are quite simple. We must maximize our skills in teaching our children to be as powerful and as healthy as they can possibly be, within the area of their lives that we are calling the how you feel dimension. We want our children to learn the specifics of no-limit living, and we can help them to attain these high-level skills through our own parenting efforts. As a wonderful spin-off goal, perhaps we will become equally powerful and healthy, the affective corner of our world.

What are the components of no-limit living? Throughout this book, each chapter will focus on specific traits which constitute the highest functioning available to people in our culture, and show how to help our children internalize this particular trait. I call those who exhibit all of these traits consistently no-limit people, largely because they have no internally imposed limitations on themselves, and refuse to permit outsiders to place any limits on them either. Others who have studied human behavior in the past have used such descriptors as self-actualized, inner-directed, fully-functioning, conscious, and awakened. It does not matter how we refer to no-limit people, as long as we know what we are talking about. A no-limit person is one who has high levels of self-respect and self-confidence, regardless of the situation. This person has great enthusiasm for himself, and feels a sense of belonging to the world. He will seek out the unknown and wander around in the mysterious, seeing life as a miracle rather than as a bother.

For the most part, the no-limit person operates on inner signals, trusting himself and willing to take risks. He experiences anger at times, but is never immobilized by it and is not a person who is out of control of himself at any time. He is not a complainer but a doer instead, and never whines to others about his bad luck. Our no-limit person does not use up his time being worried about what will happen; instead, he focuses on what he can do to avoid problems. Similarly, he is not occupied by guilt and anxiety about the past. He knows how to learn from the past without being upset and depressed about