Can children in a family where the husband and wife don’t see eye to eye in their home ever be affectionate to one another? Affection can only be generated in a family if there is affection between the dad and mom. And affection should not be partial in any way.
You’ve probably known families where the father shows affection to one child and the mother to the other. This is not the affection we are talking about. The affection we’re talking about is one where everyone is treated equally and made to feel important and necessary to the general family operations.
Parents, including guardians of course, should ensure that they show affection to each other first before they can teach their little ones not to be “warriors.” The popular saying of “do what I say but don’t do what I do” is farfetched when it comes to training a child in the way he should go.
You cannot be this and you teach the other, forgetting that children are number one imitators of their immediate adults.
Mark you, if there is grumbling and verbal artillery (read as quarreling) between or amongst the parents in a family, the children will just, in most cases, almost surely metamorphose to seasoned bickering and disagreeable adults.
“They in turn get married and start another cycle of [nothing but] foolish disagreement and bickering,” asserts John A. Schindler in his book titled How to Live in 365 Days in a Year.
“If parents have affection, one of the rules in the family can be that no one is ever to quarrel or bicker with anyone else,” adds Schindler, “That rule is not hard to maintain if the example comes from the top.”
You can “see” how affection can mean to be so powerful, how affection can be used to break the vicious cycle of foolish disagreement and bickering in your and my family, in case there is.
The inability of the father and or mother to develop a family ability for turning disagreement or frustration into victory can also cause a family to wreck.
But “whatever happens, when events occur that might disappoint or frustrate, the attitude in the family should always be,’we are not going to let that get [and keep] us down; we are going to make the best of it, and the best is going to be pretty good.’
“This gets easier and easier to do, and as the family becomes competent in its use, there will be very little that can sour the family’s day,” reasons Schindler.
Inconsistency of the parents in enforcing reasonable, firm and pleasant discipline can as well send the family early to the grave. One parent may want to be consistent in ensuring discipline of the child but the other always comes in to protect the wrong doer.
“Six out of every ten mothers are victims of circumstance,” says, Esther, a family counselor. Mothers tend to over protect children not knowing that they’re bringing up someone who will later become a burden to him/herself and to his/her parents.
This should not be our interest as parents. Our interest as parents should be to make certain that the discipline we administer to our children is consistently reasonable, firm, and pleasant.
There are arguably many other reasons why some families fall apart. But the bottom line is without affection, the family is dead.
