DEFEND
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” Eleanor Roosevelt
Defend helps you know what to protect, when to protect it and, more importantly, how.
This does not mean that you have to fight and argue with other people, although occasionally it may mean you need to kindly and firmly hold your ground.
Knowing how to defend means you know how to keep your children physically safe, as well as how to protect their incubating confidence, trust and sense of self.
Defend teaches you how to build and hold boundaries that are strong enough to protect the tender vulnerability of your child.
This tool focuses on teaching you the necessary conditions for this to occur.
The good that comes from Powerful Mothering is partly a result of adequately defending children while they are vulnerable, thus preventing any fettering, damage or retardation of the child’s tendrils of emerging self.
If new aspects of the self are cut down harshly in the emerging stage they struggle to grow anew, and, if the damage is severe enough, may not return. Defend ensures that your child’s new growth can strengthen and consolidate in safety before it is exposed to attack, inhibition or fettering.
Defend is all of the ways that you ensure that they, as vulnerable small people, without the rights and powers of adulthood, are shielded from harm so that their tender growing self can strengthen.
Protecting the Golden Thread.
1. Prevent Unnecessary Harm:
Defend means that you are vigilant to ensure that you do not do damage your child’s development and you don’t allow others to damage them either. This includes partners, neighbours, extended family, friends, acquaintances, other children, and anyone your child has contact with.
If necessary you step in, step up and intervene on your child’s behalf. Children cannot advocate for themselves or protect themselves from adults. It is up to us to ensure their safety. Defending encourages and furthers our child by preventing unnecessary harm and damage. This is what Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she stated that we need to act to prevent human misery rather than focus on avenging it.
2. Advance Don’t Hinder:
The word defend means not only protect but also to incubate, foster, nourish, promote and advance. Words opposite to defend include: frustrating, hindering, discouraging and inhibiting.
Thus, part of defending well is ensuring that we, and others, don’t harm the emerging self of the child. Some of the words related to the word defend are: champion, advocate, one who has your back, to boost, plug, campaign and work for, to assist and agitate for.
Mothers are rarely encouraged to have this role with their children and yet it is a critical role to foster strong, healthy development.
Powerful Mother: Strong, Loyal and True
3. Be Loyal to Your Child:
Defending means that you are your child’s most steadfast, loyal support system and that you will believe in your child and see their goodness, even when no-one else will and, even when they doubt themselves.
The willingness to see the goodness in another and to support and nourish it, in good times and bad, is the most powerful gift one person can give to another. Powerful Mothers willingly take this role and effectively DEFEND their developing child at all stages of growth.
There are a whole range of skills for doing this for our child and also for ourselves as Mothers. We will explore them step-by-step together on this site over time.
Just do for today what you can do.
With care, Dr. T
You can see “Defend” pinned at :http://www.pinterest.com/powerful4kids/powerful-protection-defend/