If you stop for a moment to remember, surely many of you can remember some of the phrases that your parents, teachers or friends pronounced at some point to refer to you. Maybe you didn’t give it much importance then, or maybe, instead, those words are bouncing around in your head to this day. What is clear is that, although sometimes we do not realize it, words create realities. And our children are not exempt from it.
You may have been the shy girl in class, or the bad boy in the family. You may have assimilated that you were not good at studying, or that it was better to hide your body to avoid criticism and teasing from other children. Be that as it may, some of those messages remained engraved in your mind, and even today they still have great power.
If you feel reflected in these paragraphs, you will surely know the importance of choose carefully the words and phrases we use to address our childrenbecause you know the impact they can have.
5 phrases we should avoid saying to our children
Many times we use some phrases, either out of inertia or ignorance, that we should avoid saying to our sons and daughters as much as possible.
1. “Leave, I’ll do it & rdquor;
How many times have we taken control of something because we considered that our children did not know how to do it? At first, this phrase may sound completely harmless. However, the implicit message that accompanies these words is: “You are not capable, I do not trust that you are going to do it well & rdquor ;.
If we don’t let our sons and daughters try, make mistakes, learn and even achieve things on their own, we won’t be helping them gain confidence, take responsibility, make decisions, fall down and get up… In short, as Eva Millet explained to us in this presentation, if we do not promote the autonomy of our sons and daughters, we are telling them “you can’t”, “I don’t trust you”, which is going to have a very negative impact on their esteem.
2. “We have passed math”
Many times as fathers and mothers we consider ourselves protagonists of our children’s lives. It is logical that we care a lot that our children are well, that we care about their problems and that we accompany and guide them in their lives, but from there to speaking in the first person of the plural of their experiences there is a very big step that does not seem highly recommended. give. Through this type of message, which may seem supportive or dedicated to the sons and daughters, we are denying our sons and daughters and ourselves the right to have, separately, our own history. Let our children live their lives and share their news with whoever they want, without invading their space.
3. “What a mess you are!”
In this sentence, we can substitute “disaster” by any adjective that comes to mind: nervous, bad, embarrassed, rebellious… How dangerous are labels! Be careful with these sentences in which we use the verb “to be” to define our children (or even ourselves), because we can make the mistake of hanging a label on them and, as psychologist Alberto Soler points out, “the labels are very easy to put on, but very difficult to remove”. We cannot lose sight of that “labels undermine self-esteem and, worst of all, we are ‘forcing’ them to behave the way we label them to prove us right & rdquor ;, as Beatriz Ayala explained to us in this interview.
Therefore, if we repeat to our sons and daughters that they are this or that, they will end up assimilating that these labels are part of their personality, which is quite difficult to change or correct, and not of their behavior, which they do have. a control. In this way, What if we try to aim at the “doing” and not so much to “being”? For example, instead of saying “what a mess you are”, we can say “the room is a mess”. Do you notice the difference? With the first option, we put the blame on the personality, while with the second we point to the solution: tidy up the room.
4. “How beautiful you are! How have you lost weight!”
These types of phrases can be addressed to our sons and daughters, to ourselves or they may refer to another person, the point is that the idea that underlies them is very dangerous: beauty = thineven at the cost of health.
If we want to encourage our sons and daughters to have a healthy relationship with their bodies, with food and even with others, it is very important that we help them build their self-esteem from love, and not from hate. May we give them an example of self-love and respect for ourselves and our bodies, as well as those of others.
5. “When you grow up you will go to university”
We may not pronounce this phrase as it is written, but the truth is that this idea is present in the heads of many parents: the only possible option after finishing high school is university. What if our son doesn’t want to go to college? And if he prefers another type of studies? Or if he does not want to study the career that we had thought for him or her?
The problem behind these types of phrases, or others of the same style, is that they reflect expectations that we have of our sons and daughters. And this is very dangerous, because as Francisco Castaño told us, “if you generate expectations, you are lost. Because as your son does not comply, you get frustrated and your son lowers his self-esteem. And the illusion is important, you have to have enthusiasm to accompany your child in the search for his best version & rdquor ;.
Definitely, we have to educate the child we have, not the one we would like to have. That is why it is important that we do not transfer these expectations to them based on what we would have liked to study, or what we would have liked to achieve, because our children are not us and they do not have the obligation to fulfill our frustrated dreams. Let’s not forget it.