How You Can Influence Your Child To Help Them Observe Their Thoughts

As a parent, you have the ability to influence your child and steer them in the right direction, when it comes to helping them observe their thoughts.

What parent isn’t concerned when a child wants to be friends with someone who may not be the best influence for their child? We know from past experience that forcing and demanding no interaction with such a friend may temporarily work but most often creates the opposite effect. We also know that we can’t be by our child’s side 100% of the time. What then is one to do? 

We need a new approach, a new understanding, an understanding of how things work within us because the inner determines the outer.  

An old approach that has been used over the years is where a parent discusses the delicate subject with the child wherein the friend that is considered to be a negative influence is most often implied as “bad” or “the enemy”. The parent customarily presents reasons why that friend should be avoided or unfriended. 

What is lacking in an approach such as that, is that it doesn’t address why your child is attracted to that specific friend in the first place. That is what needs to be brought to the surface and investigated. Otherwise, if a parent just lays out reasons why the child shouldn’t be friends with a certain friend (and has the child terminate that friendship), the parents have made the decision for the child without the child truly understanding for themselves and within themselves why.  

The child may even appear agreeable to end the relationship, but if there isn’t an understanding of why the relationship with that certain friend was brought to the child in the first place, another relationship will most certainly come into the child’s life that brings the same lesson to be learned. 

How many times have you left a job, a friendship, or even a marriage because you didn’t like a certain quality or characteristic about a person, only to find out that another person appeared in your life with a very similar quality? It’s the same kind of thing I am speaking about here.  

What we need is a new understanding, which includes a new way to see Life.  

A parent may start out by asking a question such as “What do you like about your friend Cindy?” The child may respond with something like “She is so confident” or “Everyone likes her”. Listen carefully to what your child says about that friend because what a child states that they like about another, is usually something they believe is missing or lacking in themselves. There is nothing missing or lacking in us. It just feels that way because we currently live from voices in our heads that speak untruths to us. 

The only way to know the truth that nothing is missing or lacking in us is to help your child learn to observe the thoughts that move through their own mind. Identified thoughts create.  

Related: How to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children: 3 Crucial Lessons To Teach

So here comes a thought in a child’s mind “Gosh, Cindy is so confident. I wish I was confident like that”. Without the observation of thought, thoughts are automatically agreed to by a certain part of us. When there is an agreement to a thought such as “I wish I was confident like that”, it is the same as the child believing that they are lacking or missing something (such as that confidence) within themselves. The child then seeks outside of themselves for that quality or characteristic that they believe is missing. 

And if you are willing to take it one step deeper, I will share with you a hidden secret that can help transform you and your child’s life. 

When we believe we are missing or lacking something, there is a universal law, a certain grace, that brings to us relationships and circumstances in our lives that embody the very thing that we believe we are missing. That is what I meant when I said: “identified thoughts create”. They are a part of a certain life principle that is vital to understand but rarely discussed in this world. 

In truth, every aspect of every possibility, good and bad, exists in us, in who and what we truly are. When we identify with a belief that we “aren’t like that”, it’s like saying the part isn’t contained in the whole. It is contained in the whole and that is why Life keeps bringing people and events back to us for us to see how we have been mistaken in that belief. 

In working with our child in helping them learn to observe their thoughts, they can learn to observe them without believing or identifying with what those thoughts are stating. When we don’t agree to believe our thoughts and don’t take action based on what they say, we create a new and better world for ourselves and others too.   

We find that we no longer want these wrong relationships and circumstances to recreate in our lives. Instead, we wish to learn for ourselves the wholeness of our true nature that Love has always been trying to teach us. However, we can’t come to learn and know that for ourselves without agreeing to see and dismiss thoughts that are trying to convince us otherwise.   

To end, I would just like to add that I’m not discounting the fact that there are situations where a parent needs to take an intervention, especially when it comes to a life-threatening relationship. The information I am sharing can supplement that intervention in a truly helpful way. 

If you want to know more about how you can influence your child to observe their thoughts, then check this video out below: