Another result of kids not knowing their place, or their usefulness in the family, is low self-esteem. Low self-esteem happens for our children when we, the parents, don’t allow our children to wrestle with the normal realities of life. Making decisions for them and not allowing them to fail prevents children from developing the necessary internal resources that are vital to identity and self-esteem.
As parents we can’t teach our kids things that we ourselves do not know. It’s likely that a parent with low self-esteem will not be able to allow their children to struggle with life because they themselves don’t feel confident in their own life struggles.
This is a but a small reason why parenting is so hard: Our kids expose our vulnerability and weakness.
Instead of growing these weaknesses in ourselves, it’s natural to take the easy way out and do things that ensure our kids cannot expose our weakness in the future.
Good parenting is about allowing our kids to organically point things out to us that we then address and mature instead of punishing or controlling our kids. The difficulty is that kids are unknowingly walking around as a mirror to us … and we don’t like it.
