What about boys?

Brave Parents Conversations #001: What if your children compete for your love?

 

We thought we'd start sharing some of the great conversations we're having inside the Brave Parents Academy.

Brave Parents Conversations #001: What if your children compete for your love?

 

Transcript

One of the things that I think we really need to focus on in raising
our girls is to remove any sense of competition.
So, we live in a very competitive
world and the way, unless we intervene a girl will grow up thinking that she is only worthy if
she's better than someone else. If she's prettier than someone else.
If she does better on her maths test and someone else or if she gets more,
love from Mum on a particular day than her sister.
And just one small thing that we do that we think is good.
You know, I've done it myself and then I read the research and went.
Oh my God, that wasn't good! Was comparative
praise. You know Violet in prep came skipping out of school
and she told me what she got on a maths test and I said,
oh, that's great. darling. What did Sarah get? And I thought,
oh my gosh, what I just did then was tell her that her her result was only
good if it was better than someone else
or we'll say to kids like you were the best behaved child in the class
or you were the best ballerina on the stage or the prettiest girl there.
And we think we're building them up. But what were actually doing is creating anxiety in them.
Because we're telling them that they're only valuable
when they're better than someone
else and we want our girls to like themselves and believe in themselves all the time.
Not just when they're superior to their peers
or their sisters. And that actually does change,
like you find yourself. This is one of those things where you need to re-parent it yourself
because, for us it was so automatic
and it just fell out of their mouths
and we just thought, what are we actually telling her there?
What's the subtext for that? And so it's going back in rethinking.
And re-parenting yourself a lot of the time to think about how can I approach that differently.
So siblings, if they hear this message over
and over again, and you know love is kind of what they're looking for, from their parents.
They're going to compete for
it because I think that is the natural way of doing it and that's the expectation.
The we’ve kind of setup. Not meaning to, but we have.
I think the other thing is that some kids just happen, their strengths, what they’re good at are the things that,
you know, are easy to measure. They’re on the report card,
or the sporting field or whatever. And then if a sibling has strengths,
that aren't easy to measure, they can feel inadequate and therefore,
more jealous and competitive for mum’s love and attention.
So, one of the things we talked about in the last foundation stone, Authenticity, is that
every child has their own unique set of strengths that.
Sometimes we have to help them find them,
if they're not, the really obvious ones. And raise the child that you have.
You have two very different children with very different sets of strengths and bring them up.
Let them know that they're both equally valuable in their own right.
And so they don't need to compete with each other because they're different. 

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