Everyone is in search of freedom.
Whether you are an adult and looking to be financially free and live the life you think you should be living or will fight for people’s rights to be free from others’ abusive control. We all have this desire to be free.
There is a common and often overstated belief that parents are not hard enough on their kids and need to be more strict. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you believe that children are “bad,” then you have this idea that they need to be controlled. It is how you were treated and is the opposite of freedom. Holding onto this guilt forces you to take part in the theft of childhood.
To get freedom, you need to raise children peacefully.
You see, now a society adjusted to living with aggression and violence because it was shown to them throughout their childhood. The principles of honor and integrity are forgotten for the benefit of compliance.
There is a huge misconception that children’s obedience is virtuous, and you must control your child’s actions. Of course, this is not true, but it also sadly allows for children’s mistreatment everywhere.
When you don’t allow kids to be free, you have no other option but to control them. Whether that is being too strict and enforcing punishments, which is fear-based, or you cater to their every need because you don’t want them to fail, also fear-based.
You use your child to fill a void from the love and attachment you did not receive in childhood. You never ask, is what I am doing, right? Instead, you focus on repairing the emptiness and loneliness you made to create so your parents could avoid the same pain. I see this dysfunction common in many families, and it sets us up for really toxic relationships in the future.
The child’s needs are never considered. You never ask yourself what would make my child’s life better? How can I be a better father?
This creates a common struggle within the family, and kids find it challenging to fit into this family system. To survive, they lose a part of themselves and may never experience the real joys of childhood.
If you have the opportunity to show your child how great life can be, with hard work, dedication, and commitment, then don’t waste that time. Stop focusing on what they are doing wrong and stop trying to correct every missed turn.
Breaking denial is painful.
You now see a lot of people talking about how kids need to learn a trade and should get a job that requires them to learn a skill. I completely agree that young people should always be learning important life skills, but the problem is the reasoning being used to direct them.
There was a time when more men worked hard and struggled in labor intensified jobs. They came home exhausted and beat up. This is what the next generation saw and what they wanted to avoid. Instead of embracing our job as men and teaching our children that there is honor in hard work and accomplishing difficult tasks, we complained and became disconnected. We believed that our life was not worthy of greatness and submitted to the false ideas that being a victim was better than being free.
Now we tell kids to go to college, which is the most important thing for their success. We destroy their chances for a better future with enormous college loan debt but still advocate for “higher education” even as the financial and economic system’s collapse before our eyes.
Thankfully most adults now see how destructive burying their children with college loan debt can be. A big problem I see is that we are currently pushing them back in the other direction. Never once considering to allow them the freedom to choose. After all, that is how we learn what works and what doesn’t. From freedom, you get the best possible results even though the path getting there may be difficult, have failures, and is time-consuming, it has always been the way to prosperity.
How about if we didn’t control every aspect of their lives? How different would society look it we set a better example? We can teach kids to live by their values only when we live on our own.
What are the values and principles we should be showing them?
The first is what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like between two people who love each other. No longer can we normalize the rampant abuse of children in society. We need to offer them the same rights that we would demand ourselves.
You cannot stop people from loving their abusers if they love being abused. This is the language we learn when we were younger, and it has only helped continue the cycle that we accept more control and less freedom.
As an adult, if you want to be controlled, that is your choice. There are apparent reasons rooted in your childhood to explain this, but that still doesn’t justify its acceptance. We all went through this as a child, and until we start treating our children better, the cycle will continue.
Right now, we choose comfort so we can belong to what we think a family should be. We continually normalize abuse and accept that children should be treated inferior to other human beings. We yell, threaten, and spank them to solidify this message. We even justify the abuses we endured as a small child to avoid the truth with how we treat our children.
We see an immense detachment in honesty when speaking about this with others. Everyone else who makes terrible decisions in life automatically gets to be a victim. We can sympathize with their bad choices and help offer solutions. If a wife is getting beaten by her husband, we tell her she must leave and is worthy of a better relationship. But when we speak of kids being hit or disciplined by adults, the majority openly support it.
A child doesn’t have the option of leaving the family; they never got to choose who their parents were. We fail to empathize with what that child feels because we are entirely cut off to the reality of how we were treated as a child. We now have become enablers to destroying the freedoms of childhood.
Whether the philosophy is to work harder or work smarter, it is not our decision. We can never know our child’s passion if we don’t allow them the freedom to make that choice.
“It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.”
— Thomas Gordon
As a father, we need to stand up for our children and be a positive influence. We need to have higher standards with the way we communicate, influence and raise our kids.
Every disfunction you see going on right now is directly connected to parents abusing their authority. Instead of dominating and managing your child, give them some control of their own life.
Give them power!
Allow them to experience the freedom and enjoyment of living life to the fullest. Even if sometimes those choices can bring you discomfort or pain.
The principles of freedom do not change because the majority of parents abuse their power. Your child is not yours to rule over, and you must understand a father’s number one job is to protect their child.
You must not bend to the influence of those not strong enough to stand for what is right. Do not settle for the comfort of being accepted by normalizing the abuse of children. Even though most fathers will openly support hitting their child, it comes at a painful cost to your soul.
Do not be an enabler in the destruction of childhood.
