What Is A Good Parent?

By Ayasha Roberson

Often my new students tell me that their primary caretaker…was a good parent. So, I ask them to define what they mean by a good parent. The typical answer is, “My parents were good people who did the best job they could.” This is the truth in most cases, but not usually the whole truth.

After a few sessions they learn about parental idealization and emotional enmeshment and little by little they come to realize that there are no perfect parents. They lean why most parents are ill prepared mentally and emotionally for the challenge of raising, educating, and nurturing a child.

I have read that a near perfect parent who receive a grade of seventy percent! This means that seventy percent of the time they demonstrated patient, kind, loving, nurturing, emotionally centered, and psychologically balanced behavior.

I, myself have never met such a super-star parent, one who only fell short of parental perfection thirty percent of the time! Personally, I believe that if a parent could demonstrate proper parental behavior forty percent of the time, it would be a great accomplishment. In fact, being as the average American parent has less than a high school education, and was raised by an emotional adult/child, I believe that most would score below twenty percent on the parent-perfection scale! It’s a sad, but true, fact that during childhood, most of us have witnessed, and therefore modeled, dysfunctional emotionally immature behavior over eighty percent of the time.

There are very few “so called” adults who have transcended their own emotional wounds, so they are merely children in adult bodies. Adult/children haven’t learned how to delay their gratification so they immaturely choose short-term gain and as a result they manifest long term pain. Knowing this, it would be prudent for all of us to implement the Law of Germination, which at its core means to…wisely sacrifice short-term gain, for long-term holistic success

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY NEEDS

Feeling Loved & Nutured

Safe & Secure in the World

Emotional Maturity

Inner Peace

PHYSICAL SURVIVAL NEEDS

Food

Shelter

Clothing

If you desire to transcend your negative conditioning, you can view your childhood experiences through neither rose-colored glasses, nor through the lens of cynicism. You need to validate and release your negatively charge emotions by owning the truth that what happened to you really happened. You must be willing to commit to emotionally adopting the child that still lives within you and Self-parenting her until she feels safe and secure again.

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