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Family Life Education Series |
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To ensure your children continue leading happy lives even during their adult life, parents need at the start instill in them a value of positive outlook on life during their upbringing. This asset, which their children will possess for the rest of their lives, will affect their daily judgement, perception of things and relationship with others. This cultivation of a positive outlook, according to Professor Wong Chung-kwong of Positive Living United Services, is based on the habits of parents.
Human beings are very habit-dependent creatures. Habits indeed are very important because without habits our actions and daily life will lack spontaneity and slow down, and make life quite impossible.
Habits take away the need to think. We just respond in ways we are trained or accustomed to. In fact, it is when we do not behave in our habitual ways that we feel uncomfortable and "not quite ourselves"!
Parents and their children interact with one another mostly through habits. I do not only mean behaviour. I also mean perception, understanding, thinking, speech and emotion. The same lively child can be perceived and understood totally differently by different parents. For example, a man describes his son as naughty, disruptive and defiant whereas his wife may describe the same boy as imaginative, energetic and assertive.
Motives of children are also often misunderstood. Lying is a very good and common example. When children lie, most parents can think of no reasons other than fear and badness: fear because children are afraid of punishment if they tell the truth and badness because lying must be due to bad motives. In my everyday psychotherapeutic work with families, I have come across numerous parents who for the first time in years appreciate, in the course of family therapy, that their children lied because of love. Children often love their parents so much that they do not want to tell them the truth if the truth will make them very worried and sad.
Many parents still only have a rather narrow range of emotional repertoire. They find it easy to express anger but difficult or even unable to express love. They exercise parental authority but not emotional sensitivity. Many still find it difficult to say "sorry" to their children.
Our habits are formed through our childhood and life experiences, and also strongly molded by our work. Most occupations carry certain occupational risks. Occupational risks can be tangible and also intangible.
I would like to share this experience. In my everyday work as a psychiatrist, I am bombarded by intense sadness and tragedies often of the most profound kind. I need always to remind myself that there are brighter and happier sides to life. In their everyday work to ensure that our society is a safe place, my friends in the Force are bombarded by crimes and evils that they have to deal with. They perhaps would like to remind themselves that when they return home from work, they would want to make sure that whatever law enforcer habits and mode of thinking they bring home are consistent with happy family life.
We must keep in mind that most parental activities are habits. At the end of the day, it is not our wish but our habits that decide what our children will become. We would like to cultivate good parental habits such as giving encouragement, empathetic listening and emotional sensitivity. It is crucial that parents control their habits rather than habits control them. The only sure way we can take control of our habits is that we regularly give ourselves quiet moments of reflection when we ask ourselves searching questions such as "What examples am I setting for my children?" "Do I really understand them?" "Do they really feel I love them?" "How could I improve myself?"
Any questions or comments, please feel free to call your respective regional welfare officer. (All consultations are treated with total confidence.)
HKI : 2804-1570 MAR : 2301-1670
(The full text will be uploaded onto the Healthy Lifestyle Website of POINT)
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