Raising the Next Generation by Shelly Lefkoe

As a parent, you tend to get caught up in day-to-day minutia and may forget what your dreams for your children are. If we told you that your job is being responsible for the physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional development of your child, would you say, “No worries, I got this?”

It’s easy to lose sight of how what we say and do impacts our children. We don’t realize how our actions today can affect the rest of their lives. Beliefs form at a young age and are rarely outgrown. It’s far easier to instill strong positive beliefs early on than to reverse negative beliefs as an adult. In this module, we’ll explore the single most important thing you need to know as a parent and how knowing this one thing can help determine your child’s future success and happiness.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover what you really want for your children (and it may not be what you think you want!)
• Uncover the single most important thing that may be preventing your children from enjoying happy, successful lives
• Acquire the keys to raising a happy, conscious child who will make a difference in the world
• Understand how beliefs (what your children believe to be true about themselves, life and people) can keep your children from moving forward and having a wonderful life — self-esteem and confidence are not the only predictors of future success
• Find out which beliefs will empower your children, and how beliefs can help or hurt them
• Discover the 10 worst things you can do to a child — many parents do these unknowingly to the detriment of their children’s happiness and wellbeing

Damaging beliefs keep a person from living their fullest, best life. In this module, we’ll talk about the five most harmful and common beliefs that people develop (even people you may think are successful) and how you as a parent can prevent their formation in your children. We’ll also look at the positive side of beliefs — the beliefs that help people excel in life, live out their dreams and be happy, positive contributors to society.

In this session, you’ll:

• Uncover how beliefs shape a person’s reality, influence their actions, behaviors and choices, and determine what they attract into their lives
• Discover the five most damaging beliefs and how they sabotage a person in adult life
• Find out why problems in school, issues with friends, depression and underperformance are tied to a child’s beliefs
• Be given techniques to ensure that your child grows up with healthy beliefs; for example, beliefs like “I am capable” and “I make a difference” will allow them to make a positive impact in the world
• Discover the two key questions every parent must ask themselves before they react to their child
• Understand how teaching children “the right answers” actually prevents them from learning

Often as parents, we want our children to be or react in a certain way that isn’t compatible with their current stage of development. In other words, they’re not able to think the way we want them to or expect them to because their brains are still developing. At each stage of development, children are forming beliefs about themselves. If you have unrealistic expectations about what they should be able to do — and they’re not developed enough physically or emotionally to meet those expectations — your unrealistic desires can do major damage to their developing self-esteem and confidence. Children may start to believe something is wrong with them because they can’t be or do what you’re expecting them to be or do.

In this session, you’ll:

• Explore the stages of childhood development and what you can realistically expect from your child in each phase
• Understand why expecting teenagers to act and behave like adults can create a very dangerous belief
• Discover how you can help children become world-centric adults
• Find out why a harmful belief that 90% of children develop can cause resentment and rob them of their free will

In this module, you’ll learn how managing your stress leads to better parenting. No matter how committed we are to being parents who help our children form positive beliefs, when we’re undergoing significant stress we’re more likely to get annoyed, upset or angry. The same behavior from our children that we laugh off when we’re in a good mood can cause us to blow our tops when we’re feeling stressed out. It follows that significantly reducing your stress will improve your relationship with your children.

As you discovered in the previous module, if your expectations are consistent with what your child is capable of, you’ll improve the quality of your interactions with your children and reduce your stress level. But there’s something else you can do to virtually eliminate your stress.

In this session, you’ll:

• Understand why events have no inherent meaning and can’t cause reactions in and of themselves
• Appreciate how almost all feelings come from the meaning you assign to events
• See that if you stop giving meaning to meaningless events, you can eliminate your negative feelings around those events
• Recognize that stress is the result of negative feelings — no negative feelings, no stress
• Determine how to distinguish meaning from events so you can realize when you’re imbuing a neutral event with meaning
• Explore how to dissolve meaning

In this module, you’ll discover how to help your children be free to express themselves, and how we as parents, even with all our uncertainty, can ensure that our children grow up with a sense of freedom, joy, resilience, fearlessness and innovation.

In this session, you’ll:

• Understand how your beliefs may be limiting your sense of freedom (hint: it has to do with letting things happen instead of making things happen)
• Realize the real definition of self-esteem — what creates and what the link is between self-esteem and beliefs
• Identify the one word you should immediately remove from your vocabulary — and the word you should replace it with
• Explore how self-esteem comes from the self and not from others
• Find out how to facilitate an “I can” environment and why it’s the most powerful tool in your parenting toolbox
• Investigate why resilience is so important and how to instill it in your child
• Discover how you and your child can experience true freedom
• Learn to model how to be in the present moment

People who have a strong value system and know what they stand for have it easier in life than those who have not clearly defined their values. When your values are clear, your journey is more fulfilling. The context in which you parent and live your life affects everything. Most people — even the most well-intentioned people — parent arbitrarily, which can have devastating effects on their children.

In this session, you’ll:

• Explore why so many people are living “should” lives and how to shift to living a value-generated life — when you know what your values are, the right decisions come naturally and easily
• Understand how to make sure your child knows who they are and how to build their own personal value system
• Appreciate how to strengthen your family through the understanding that each person contributes to the whole — and why each individual is better for it
• Realize why creating a clearly outlined “Family Context” should be a top priority
• Appreciate the importance of teaching kids about sufficiency — that they are enough and they have enough
• Discover how to escape the trap of entitlement — how to teach your kids to achieve deep satisfaction independent of what or how much they own
• Learn how to turn complaints into requests
• Recognize the importance of apologizing and remaking commitments
• Realize the power and importance of creating and nurturing relationships
• Establish the importance of integrity and how to model it
• Understand the three myths of scarcity and how banishing them empowers children