THE CHALLENGES OF CHILDREN!

Hello from not so sunny London, England.

Well all is well overall. Woke up a out every hour last night but felt great in the gym this morning.

I did 4 mini- circuits of:
Deadlift x. 4
High Cable Row x12 ea.
Woodchop x12 ea
On about 2:30 rest between circuits.

Matt Walden was with me doing his own workout. We had a lovely long steam and sauna with many cold showers as we discussed the many challenges of life, love, and business.

Penny is doing well too. We are in route to Loughborough University now. Penny got me a bottle of “Insanity” hot sauce, and yet again…I forgot how hot that stuff is and now I assure you that only my East Indian and Jamaican parasites are partying!

But here is my post that I also wanted to share with you today.

I’m sure many of you have found that children, as much as you love them, can be a royal pain in the ass at times!

Fortunately, I was wise enough to listen to my inner-voice and stick to one offspring!

I had my son, Paul Chek Jr., with my first wife Sue. Paul Jr. was born when just a few days after I had just turned 18, so I had no idea what I was getting into!which could be said for the event that led to his creation!

I guess I should have read the operators manual for a penis before I started running around testing it. Don’t get me wrong here though. I’m not implying that I was unhappy that she became pregnant. I’m only implying that often, when we are immature or don’t think past one’s penis, we engage in sex acts or what we perceive to be an act of making love without realizing the magnitude of what we may be creating!

As I’ve described in detail in previous posts, our children spend the first seven years of their life downloading every event in their environment onto the hard drive of their mind.

We give them their operational software. Yet, while we are unconsciously programming our children, we are seldom aware that they are recording everything about us and our interactions we’d prefer not to relive!

This reality typically results in our judging our children as lazy, argumentative, dogmatic, stubborn, hysterical, bullish, complainers, whiners, etc!

Many times I’ve had parents consult me because they wanted me to fix their child.

90% of the time, in just a few minutes, I could spot all the behavioral characteristics they complained about as the problem with their child as inherent to their own nature.

As you can imagine, I don’t win many Brownie points for pointing out that that their child (or children) were merely “emulating their teachers”!

When children reach puberty, they naturally tend to disagree with almost everything we say or do. As painful as this may be, it is essential to evolution; if our children did exactly as we do, they wouldn’t have the skills to interface with a changing environment.

Imagine how challenging your children’s life would be today if your children never chose to learn how to use computers 20 years ago? That said, 20 years ago many parents were very derogatory toward their children’s use of computers and calculators.

Puberty is often a very challenging time for parents. Parents don’t want to be wrong and they want their children to be safe. But they don’t feel secure when their children start living out of accord with the way they want them to live.

In short order, the tension between parent and child can become so great that the child is only reassured that they don’t want to be like mom or dad!and!they don’t even want to be around mom and dad!

This can be a dangerous time and such events are also dangerous because this is the time when our children become very active in the world outside the home. Therefore, they are more likely to find themselves in troubles they aren’t really equipped to deal with.

My own son has been a great teacher to me. He has the stubbornness of his Capricorn mother, and the capacity to engage complex concepts of his father. When you combine stubbornness and a powerful mind together in your child, you certainly have your work cut out for you.

I found that the more I judged my son and told him that what he was doing was wrong, foolish, stupid, futile, a waste of time, etc! the more combative and challenging our relationship become.

Admittedly, I didn’t learn as fast as I should have with my knowledge. Why, because we don’t easily see our own shadows and we don’t often have the life experience to know best!

In the picture you see here, my son and I are playing the drum together. He is a great drummer and loves to chant as well.

It took me until he was about 28 to finally learn not to deal with him or his challenges at the level of logical or rational thought – it’s too easy to misinterpret each other’s intentions there.

Now, when my son talks to me on the phone or comes to visit, I don’t act on any judgments I may have. I accept responsibility for the fact that to have the parents he did, as immature as they were, must be very challenging for him. I accept that the combination of my personality with his mother’s personality and genetic traits could be a really challenging suit to have to wear every day.

When we are together in any way, I do my best to give him a safe place to tell me what’s going on in his life.

I do my best not to hear the complaints as complaints, but as the expression of his own unmet needs.

I wait for him to ask me for help, or, I ask if he’d be interested in my opinion before making statements that may be perceived as judgments, to the best of my ability.

What I found works the very best for us is not to try and fix anything. When we get together and play music, create art, or stack some rocks, we are in flow together. There is nothing to judge. No words. No labels. Only an experience we share together.

If I’ve learned anything as a parent, it is:

1. That I must accept my responsibility for being one of his chief programmers.

2. That judging and labeling never help in cultivating needed solutions.

3. That all judgments reflect unmet needs and if I’m judging, I must have an unmet need(s), as must he if he is judging.

4. That “telling” usually is far less effective than “listening”.

5. That by creating something together that doesn’t require the exchange of words, such as art or music creates a safe place for us to bond together.

6. That connecting before correcting is a very wise idea.

7. That instead of correcting him as though he were wrong, it is better to see if I can find a time when I made the same or similar mistake and share how I resolved the issue. That seems to work better than telling him how to resolve his “problems”.

I’m still learning a lot every day about relationships and life.

I’m still learning a lot about life and it’s challenges for a young man whenever I’m talking to or with my son.

I don’t want to loose the opportunity to contribute to his life and I don’t want to have to be wiping bottoms for the rest of my life either.

Therefore, I’m honestly invested in being a mature parent for him, and gently letting him find solutions to his own challenges so that he can build his own self-esteem and sense of self-worth.

Our children are not always easy, but, they are the most tangible form of reincarnation there is.

That said, how you handle your children today, determines in large part what of you continues to lives on in the world.

Love and chi,
Paul Chek