I often get questions from PPS Practitioners about how to raise a healthy child. The topic has been the basis for countless books and I can't address it here in full, but I can offer what I take to be the essentials. If you can put the principles in this article to use when raising your children, there's little doubt your kids will be healthier and much more likely to be living their legacy.

Let them live
To start with, we need to learn to just let our children live.  We don't have to tell them or force them to do what we want. We just need to show them how to live. It is incredibly easy to stifle a child's creativity and sense of autonomy, especially at an early stage. That is why it is so important to allow your children to live and explore their capacities – to feel out who they are and what they can do.

Now I'm not telling you to let your kids run wild. While it is important that your children feel free to explore their surroundings, it is also critical that the child have limits and that transgressions against those limits have consequences. But the key here isn't to be an authoritarian. The process of setting limits and consequences shouldn't be conducted solely by the parents. Rather, parents and children together should agree on fair and enforceable consequences each time a limit is transgressed. This is the child's first introduction into ethics and relationships. Work, world and relationship ethics are nothing but an outgrowth of the parental ethics.

The kind of consequences and limits are important as well. Enforcing through an iron fist doesn't teach anyone about anything but how to live under a dictatorship.  I should know. I was raised in a dictatorship where punishment was a guarantee unless directions were followed explicitly. I can tell you I didn't enjoy that at all! What I learned was to think very carefully whenever I raised my hand to my son because I had first hand knowledge of what a dictatorship feels like.

Respect your children
You've heard it before – the foundation for any relationship is respect. The problem is, that saying often goes forgotten when it comes to children. There are a number of reasons why we don't often respect kids. Often, it's because we attach respect to characteristics that children haven't yet had the chance to develop – age, experience, achievements. Those characteristics shouldn't be requisite for respecting your children. If you do not respect your child the relationship is bound to suffer.

And don't underestimate your child's ability to see when you are extending your respect. Children are often more in touch with their intuitions than adults. They are likely to sense very clearly when they are interacting with someone that doesn't respect them.

One final word about respect in your relationship with your children – it must be mutual. In my experience, very few of the people I grew up with respected their parents. As with setting limits, the key here is once again to avoid being an authoritarian. Teach and lead your children by example and it's far more likely that they will respect you.

Be aware of your children's environment and its impact on their psychology
When we raise our children, we need to be aware of how the child views and feels about what is happening in his or her world, as well as what thoughts and behavior are appropriate for the child's age and development.  I often see parents bringing young children into R rated movies. These parents are either too interested in immediate gratification for themselves, or too cheap to get babysitters. Either way, their children just don't have the full range of rationality to understand and process what it is that they are seeing on the movie screen. Young kids especially don't have the capacity to differentiate what is normal or abnormal, real or fiction. Acting and action are one in the same in a child's head. If that is the case, imagine the effect that seeing movie violence or sexuality can have. Seeing a parent, who understands the movie in its context, laugh at violence when the child can't distinguish between fictional and real may enforce the message that violence is amusing. We simply cannot ignore how our children develop psychologically.

Communicate with them: tone and body language are just as important as words
Your tone and the kind of language that you use can have a greater effect on the child than the actual words that you use. Face to face communication is never simply about the words that we use. In fact, the same sentence, uttered with a different tone and said with a different stance – arms crossed over your chest versus hands in your pockets – can convey an entirely different message. Listen to the difference in “I think you're wrong,” and “I think you're wrong.” The words are the same but the different emphasis can make a world of difference in what is communicated to your child. The first expression sounds aggressive while the second expression sounds open to question. Moreover, because children are able to recognize and understand both tone and body language far earlier in their development than they are the words that you use, it's very important to start attending to these aspects of communication from the birth of you children onwards.

Communicate with them: words can have a physical impact
Finally, of course, our words also affect our children. What words do you choose when you talk to your child? Are they kind or harsh? Are they encouraging or demanding? Remember that the cycle of creation proceeds from thought to word to deed. This is no less true of the adults that we help to create, so we must take care to choose our words carefully. Let me emphasize this point with some of the research performed by Dr. Masaru Emoto. In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Dr. Emoto showed that water itself is responsive to the language that we use around it. In one study, he issued some water the command “Do it!” and then recorded an image of the water crystals. He then showed the water the request “Let's do it!” In response to the request the water crystals are much more beautiful than in response to the command. What does this tell you about your child? Remember that a newborn child is about 80% water. The tone of your voice and the words that you use can alter the very structure of water molecules in your child! Your very words can alter your child's biology in ways that most people are unaware of. So please, think carefully about how you speak to your child.

With this model in place, I think that we can now gain some measure of insight into why we do a lot of the things we do as adults. If you think back to when you were a child and hold this model up to way you were raised, you may see ways in which your parents diverged from it. If you are fortunate, they may have followed it and they were really good to you.  Let me just say that I've had a small number PPS Practitioners tell me about how great their parents were and how they did a wonderful job of raising them. However, when most PPS Practitioners discuss their parents, they generally end up wishing that their parents did a better job of raising them. That's OK. Your parents did the best job that they could. Now you get to be your own parent and you have your hand on the helm so you can take charge of your life. Just remember that when you have a child, you're grabbing the wheel for them too.