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Who will win the LOYALTY of your children?

If you take nothing else away from reading this book, PLEASE hear me on this…it is the crux…the bottom-line…the heart and soul of my message and WHY I wrote this book: What every parent in America (and perhaps the world) must understand is that you are in a daily competition for the heart, mind, and loyalty of your children. If you don’t understand that—or are unaware of that—you’re not even in the game. Therefore, mom and dad you need to get in the game because what’s at stake is your children’s loyalty and the main question—the challenge—you should be concerned with is: Who is going to win the battle for loyalty? I urge you not to take your child's loyalty for granted. Parents, you are being undermined and betrayed. You cannot count on our institutions to honor the values you choose to teach your own children. There is an intentional effort to transfer influence and power away from you. This anti-parent influence is essentially all around you and the fact is there is no escaping it. That’s the bad news. But the good news is there are ways for parents to counter this influence and that's what you will learn by reading about Parents on a Mission.

Parent Personal Growth in Emotional MaturityAs long as you live, keep learning how to live. - Seneca

Each time before I begin teaching the POM curriculum, I always give a sort of warning, a heads-up, about what’s coming by asking for the participants in the class (or training) for their permission to challenge them.  Of course, not knowing what I quite mean by this, they always agree.  And usually by session two or three they begin to understand why I asked them for their permission to challenge them because by this time we have come to that place of having to deal with self. 

In various exercises they are instructed to look within themselves. Something they are not accustomed to doing.  Eventually, step-by-step, they begin to see their situation, their family, and children in a new light from an inside-out
perspective. They make comments like, “I thought I was going to learn about my kids…I thought we were going to talk about them and their issues not me and my issues.” 

I remember one woman, in a POM Colorado Department of Corrections training I was conducting, came up to me on one of the breaks and said, “I didn’t know you were going to make me cry.”

Nevertheless, my experience over the years has been that parents appreciate this challenge.  They appreciate the insights they gain about themselves and how their own relationship with their parents and family of origin has—and is still—affecting them and influencing their parental style of raising their children.  Some of that is good…some of it not so good.  Yet, the exciting and empowering part is they then begin to realize that the solution to building or restoring healthy relationships with their children is within their power if they are willing to do the work to change and grow, which is what the POM classes are designed to do.

The reality is personal growth in emotional maturity for many parents can be a very complex and deep emotional process.  Old wounds are difficult to heal.  Old life experiences can be hard to recall.  Old habits are not easily replaced, and old mind-sets are not easily changed.  Thus, in raising our own children we can easily get stuck in the “if it was good enough for me it’s good enough for you” mentality.   

But the challenge—the question is—is it good enough?  Was it “good enough” for you?  And if it was then you are a blessed individual that had an emotionally functional home where you received the emotional security, stability, and significance that is needed for all children.  However, what I have experienced over the years of working with parents is that the presence of our past in the present was more of a hindrance than help in raising happy, emotionally healthy children.  

“…the strength and fruitfulness that trees exhibit above the ground is connected in the most direct and natural manner to that part of the tree that we rarely see. Indeed, a tree’s root system not only formats its kind; it is the repository if not the presence of its past, as it grows through the generation—to—generation process of its limbs and branches. Most efforts to understand relationship systems recognize the impact of the past…The nature of connections in the present can have more to do with what has been transmitted successfully for many generations than with the logic of their contemporary relationship.”

This principle, personal growth in emotional maturity, begins with the awareness and recognition of the presence of our past in the present and is the key foundational principle that is so effective in transforming families. As I like to remind parents when teaching and training, we grow old automatically, but we do not grow up automatically. 

Growing up requires intentional effort; insight, self-reflection, and the ability to take responsibility for one’s own life, actions, and circumstances. It’s a lifelong journey that must constantly be worked on from the inside out where character is built and loyalty to conscience becomes a habit. (Covey 1970)

Over the course of my career, I have found the lack of emotional maturity to be the root cause of many family problems, dysfunction, and alienated parent-child relationships.

To illustrate the importance of growth in our maturity level I like to refer to what I call living in our peak potential. Our peak potential simply means to live at the top of our human capacity.  To live fully; to live our best version of our self; to be all we were meant to be, to experience our optimal life performance. 
This thought of peak potential came to me one day as I was listening to Dr. Stephen R. Covey when he asked this question: Is my personal potential greater than my life experience? Or am I living in my potential as my daily experience?