Needy Babies and Children

From birth, the tiny human being is equipped with a wonderful tool to alert the care giver that she is in need.  A baby's cry stimulates a mother to promptly move to care for the child.  As the child slowly grows and matures, vocal sounds evolve and the child has a wide variety of sounds, words, tones and expressions to communicate the details of her needs with greater precision.  As the child grows older, many parents experience a lessening in their level of patience with their child expressing her needs.   This may be correlated with the parent experiencing the burden of increased social pressures to raise "independent" children - children that don't require much from mom and dad.   

This is a most curious myth that exists in our heads and for many parents is very palpable, perhaps to the point of feeling quite uncomfortable.... even excruciating.  

Parents who buy-into this line of thinking may begin to question the positive intent of the child.  Words like "manipulation" or "demanding" or "needy" may come to mind when referring to the child.  Parents may think that they should start weaning the child off of them as a provider for their needs.  They begin pushing their youngster away in attempts to "teach them independence".  They may feel inner confusion about this choice, which is often an alert that the belief is mis-aligned with their inner truth and with the unique level of need of their child.   They may seek out information and advice that supports and upholds the misaligned belief to need-wean, and even when they find it, they continue to feel confused and "not quite right" about following the advice. 

Not going along with social pressures can bring up feelings of self-criticism, insecurity and fears of looking like a "bad" parent.  We may tell ourselves "stories" to justify our disconnected actions  --  that the child "shouldn't be so clingy", "shouldn't need me so much at this age", "shouldn't want to be held so regularly", and so on.  We feel dissonance between our ability to intuitively know what is right for our child and her unique needs and what the "experts" might say.  It can be very difficult to trust in and follow the cues of our children because we fear our intuition may be "off".  We fear that society will disapprove of our methods if they appear unusual. 

Sadly, when parents accept this pressure and buy-in to societal standards of child behaviour and needs, they perpetuate old myths that steer us away from being intuitive and flexible with our children.  They move us in a direction of thinking that something could be "wrong" with our child and their personal level of need or development.  This can push us to choose actions that create distrust and disconnection and perhaps fail to support our child where she is at.  The child senses the shift in the level of attentiveness for her needs -- the pre-mature attempts to push her away or in a direction she is not yet ready for -- and her cries for attentiveness become more emphatic.  The deeper the old, disadvantageous assumptions are ingrained in us, the more stubbornly we stick to resisting our child's legitimate need-based communications.  Without conscious change, this will escalate for some time until the child develops habitually dysfunctional ways of communicating her needs or emotionally shuts down, perhaps manifesting the very "dysfunction" that the parent was fearing and attempting to prevent.

Becoming aware of parenting practices that are Optimal for loving evolution means placing everything that feels inauthentic, or "not quite right" under the microscope.  When we closely examine societal assumptions, we can see that changing the way we think about caring for our children and how we choose to respond to them can have huge impact in our society.   Continuing to shed assumptions that no longer serve us in the highest way brings us ever-closer to the peaceful, loving race we all wish to be.  We, parents of today, have complete free choice in how we choose to Be with our children.  This, in turn, influences the conscious evolution of the next generation on the planet.  Imagine the exponential increase in loving connection and joy that our children will have with their children if we raise them in a conscious, Love-led fashion?  We can dismantle and discard the out-dated, control-based beliefs and choose something higher and better for our families.  In doing so, we offer an amazingly joyful and free existence to our children... then their children.... and infinitely on....    
Parents: how powerful of a purpose is THAT?!?