Teaching Children to be Authentic How do we go about teaching
children to be authentic? Just be Yourself! How often have you
said to your children, "Just be yourself" when they come to you
for reassurance? It's certainly a great piece of advice and one
that we are all striving to meet. However, for many children,
being themselves isn't an easy concept to understand, especially
if they feel anxious, worried or uncertain. Our own self
acceptance is the notion that we need to be aware of as we guide
our children toward emotional maturity - modelling acceptance of
ourselves is crucial to teaching this notion to our children so
that they in turn become self accepting. We model self
acceptance when we show it through our actions and verbalise our
own self approval, self respect and self care to our children.
For many parents, this is a difficult concept to grasp as it is
the problem we ourselves are working on - our self esteem may
also be low and our self identity still attached to issues
outside our sense of self