A child who arrived whole stays whole when the grown-ups around her meet her as an equal. Everything a conscious birth protects, her trust, her feeling-based compass, her yay and her nay, either keeps growing or slowly gets talked over in the years that follow, and the difference lives in how we relate to her day by day.
If you want your children to know their own self worth, show them that they are worthy of your time, presence and focus, and treat them as fully equal and just as important as the other adults around you.
Born sovereign
Younglings come into this world in their natural innocence, curious and open toward Life, relating from love and looking to the grown-ups for signs that their own unique self is welcome here. Each one arrives with the gift of Free Will, the freedom to choose guided by feelings that tell them clearly whether they like or want something, and each one is equal in worth to every other human being on this Earth. Anything that meets a child outside of love imprints, and so the way we speak to them becomes the very ground they stand on.
Speaking to them as we speak to friends
A simple test opens this whole practice: speak to a child the way you would speak to a dear friend. Most of us direct, correct and instruct children in tones we would reserve for no grown-up, and when we look honestly at why, we usually find it is how we were spoken to ourselves. That pattern belongs to our own early imprinting, and the younglings offer us the chance to heal it.
Feeling-based relating with a child means checking in. We ask how she feels about doing something, whether she wants to, and, if curiosity follows, what makes it a nay for her today. A child met this way keeps her sense of purpose and belonging, and her endless “why?” becomes an invitation to share how something truly feels for us, beyond the rules we were handed.
The children as our teachers
Relating this way takes practice, because most of us were raised in families where our own feelings were rarely asked about. That practice is where the gift lies: each time a child’s freedom touches an old place in us, we are shown something still waiting to be resolved from our own childhood, and as we resolve it, life with the younglings becomes more joyful, more real and more equal. Children live in the present moment with ease, trust in the good will of the people around them, and look to us for gentle guidance and the reassurance that they are safe, loved and provided for.
All Life is wired for health, thriving and abundance, and the human organism is always working toward resolving what is unresolved in its cells so each of us can grow into our own unique gift. Follow the younglings: they are often still deeply connected to their nature, and being met as equals builds their felt sense of their own worth.
The story of one youngling who arrived whole and stayed whole for seventeen years lives in All the Way Whole →
Souvereign