Ep 5: Can You Really Be a Parent After 17 Years of Absence?

If you're a parent looking for practical, sound, solid advice in an ever-increasing dangerous world, then this podcast is for you. So here's your host, Richard Ramos.

His dad has raised him for 17 years, but his mother. Finally comes crawling back, but this teen is defiant, and his refusal causes the dispute to go legal. So when his biological mom comes crawling back 17 years after abandoning him with the expectation of playing happy families, he is understandably not impressed. But her reaction to his rejection is unexpected Leading to the threat of a legal dispute. The teen says, My biological mother wasn't ready or whatever and gave me to Dad to raise at birth. She lived about an hour from us, so I saw her around, but she never talked to me. When I was little, I would try to wave or speak to her, but she didn't want to know me. Eventually, I stopped seeing her as anything to me. I guess sometime in the last three or four years, my biological mother has gotten married and she had kids with her husband. She reached out to Dad a few months ago and told him she wanted to see me. Dad talked to me and I didn't want to see her, so he told her no. But she got a lawyer involved, and now Dad's lawyer and her lawyer were communicating, and she made the threat. Through her lawyer that she would sue for custody or visitation if Dad didn't comply with making me talk to her. I told Dad to agree. I didn't want to go to court. I didn't want a therapist getting involved. I have zero interest in a relationship with her, and I knew that would potentially be pushed for until I'm 18, so I agreed to meet with her. It was awful. She told me about her husband and kids and how she felt it would be good for me to meet them and have a relationship with them. I turned her down and said it would never happen, and that was the end of us talking. But the situation didn't end there. She pressed Dad on it through the lawyers, and she's prepared to go to court And pay a ton of money to make this happen. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Parent Whisperer Podcast. I'm Richard Ramos. This story is an example of the kind of parent immaturity that hinders, strains, and causes the parent-child relationship to break and fall apart. And in this episode, I want to share with you the 6 foundational principles we teach in Parents on a Mission. The first and most important being parent personal growth in emotional maturity. But before I do that, let's go back to the story and look again at what's happening with this 17-year-old young man and his estranged mother. First of all, she had abandoned him when he was born, and as he said, wanted nothing to do with her. And now, 17 years later, she not only wants back in his life, but wants him to immediately accept her new family and be involved with them. Understandably, the son wants nothing to do with it, but that's really not the issue I want to address. What I want to focus on is the fact that, based on her actions and reaction, she still hasn't grown up. She's not a mature or acting like a mature adult. Now, for her to all of a sudden show up after 17 years is one thing, but for her to expect and really demand. Her abandoned son to immediately accept her desire to see him and get to know her new family, it's a bit much to say the least. And secondly, when she doesn't get her way, her actions speak even louder to her immaturity, wanting to go to court and sue the dad who, according to the son, had done a great job of raising his son. As a single parent. So I think you get my point without me getting into all the rest of the details, because this is just one of so many examples that explains why the first principle we emphasize in Parents on a Mission is the importance of parent personal growth in emotional maturity. And as I've said before, and I'm sure you're going to hear me say again and again, growing old is automatic. I can attest to that. I didn't try, it just happens. But growing up is not automatic. Our age does not automatically equate To maturity and wisdom. Parent personal growth in emotional maturity is vital because everything else we teach, suggest, and encourage parents in principles of raising our children relies on your ability to consistently work on yourself and any underlying and unresolved issues You might have from your own upbringing in your family of origin. So if you were to say to me, okay, Richard, I get it, I got it, I agree with you, I want to grow, how do I go about it? Here's how we teach this process. We break it down into 4 very basic steps. Now, There are a lot of other ways as far as personal growth and emotional maturity or emotional intelligence, but I'm just trying to keep it simple. These are the 4 basic steps we teach. Number 1 is to know yourself to grow yourself. Number 2 is to understand the power of your thoughts or the power of your thought life. Number 3 is to understand the power of your choices, which are a result of your thought life. And number 4 is knowing and understanding the power of forgiveness. So today in this episode, I'm only gonna cover the first step, know yourself to grow yourself. The first step in this process is to slow down, Mom and Dad. Slow down and get quiet. Now, how you do that, you can do this through a process of meditation or prayer or whatever you would like to call it. But the point is, to grow and know myself, I need to turn off the noise, all the noise outside of me. The radio, the texting, the emails, the television, the music, all the different things and distractions that are going on around me all the time. I need to be able to turn that off, but also turn off the noise inside me, or in other words, my emotions and my thinking and all the maybe thoughts that are just going through my mind all the time. Now, this does take practice. And the ability to slow down and get quiet doesn't happen overnight. But if you stay with it and practice it, you'll get better and better at it, and it'll—you'll see how it will really help you. Now, where you do this and how long and how often you do this is up to you. But if you want to grow, this process will help you. In a number of ways. Number one, in this quiet time, you want to practice thinking about your thinking about you. Thinking about your thinking about you. Now, why is that important? Because the truth is, all of my relationships flow out of my relationship. With myself. So if I don't like myself, or if I don't love myself, if I'm not comfortable with myself, or as they say, comfortable in my own skin, that's going to have an effect on your relationships. And right now we're talking about the parent-child relationship. So I need to get in that quiet place where it might be a special chair, it might be in the shower, it might be laying in bed, it might be in your car. But you gotta get in that place and practice thinking about your thinking about you. One of the ways to know your thoughts about you are usually revealed in our self-talk. What I mean by self-talk are the words that we use to describe ourselves. For example, if somebody says, hey, I notice you, you have a new hairstyle, man, I really like it, looks great. And you say, yeah, it's okay, but it really didn't come out the way I wanted it to. Or someone says, wow, you know, I really like that dress you have on. It, you know, it looks great on you. You say, yeah, you know, but it's, it's just a little tighter than I really want it to be. I'm not comfortable. Or someone says, that was a great teaching you gave. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was okay, but I just forgot to say something. In other words, you're putting yourself down. You're belittling yourself, and those words are revealing to you the way you think about yourself. So that's the importance of this process. Another thing that happens in this quiet time is that we learn where our emotional buttons are, or emotional landmines. When you step on that, oh my God, you know, and you start to learn these things that— what's causing me to be so anxious? Why am I getting angry? What's causing this irritation I have? Why am I so frustrated? What are the things, the landmines that I step on or other people step on, the buttons that push me and cause me to get frustrated and irritated and angry and be full of anxiety? We start to learn those things in this quiet time and ask these questions: What causes me to feel And to do and to say the negative things that I feel and that I do and that I say. And thirdly, another thing during this time, this quiet time, it helps me to listen to and work towards alignment with my conscience. Everybody has a conscience, and our conscience is unemotional, it's unpolitical, it just calls the balls and strikes. That was right, Richard. That was wrong, Richard. What you did was right. What you did was wrong. What you said was right. What you said was wrong. But see, the thing about that in growing in maturity is that a lot of times we don't listen to our conscience because we can choose not to. And when your conscience is telling you you need to go back and correct that, what you did or what you said, the way you're feeling. But we don't have to. But when we align ourselves with our conscience, and we listen to our conscience, and we go back and we make the correction, that is when you are growing. And I'm suggesting that these things take place as we get quiet and pray or meditate and think about these things. Now, what are some of the signs that tell me To know that I'm starting to grow. Let me give you a few of them. Number one is that you have more self-control. You notice that you're more aware of yourself, and so you're more controlling yourself. You know where those landmines are at, and you're more aware. Another thing is that you recognize you're more patient than you used to be. You're not getting as anxious as you used to over certain things. Another sign is that you're more cooperative when you don't get your way. It's easy to cooperate with people when we get our way, but what happens when we don't get our way? But when we see ourselves, oh well, okay, you guys, all right, fine, we'll go see that movie instead of the one I wanted to go see, and you're more cooperative even though you didn't get your way. Another sign of growth is that You're slower to speak. You learn not to just be blurting out everything you feel and you just say and doesn't matter. You, you stop yourself and say, oh, maybe I shouldn't make that comment right now. Another sign is that you are more flexible than rigid. Rigid meaning like, no, we have to do it this way. It's always done this way and I've always done it that way. And so we're going to do it this way. And it doesn't even matter whether it's effective or the best or even good. It doesn't matter. We're just rigid. But when we're growing and being self-aware and learning about ourselves, we become more flexible because we realize maybe, you know, we're not always right. Maybe there is a better way, etc. Another sign of growth is owning my mistakes and apologizing. That is a huge— that's a huge one for a mom and dad. And that goes a long way. And finally, another one is anger used in the right way. Anger used for the right reason, towards the right person, in the right place, and to the right degree. That's what Aristotle called righteous indignation, because sometimes we might need to use our ability to be angry to make the point, or to protect ourselves or others to get the outcome that we want or that we need to have in the moment. There's a story about a father who had a couple of daughters, and he's in the office with his counselor, and the counselor is telling him, look, man, you're going to lose your daughters if you keep yelling at them the way you, you do. You keep getting angry and you're screaming at them and you're scolding them all the time. You're gonna lose them. So he leaves the office and gets home, and sure enough, there's his youngest daughter on the phone when he had told her not to be using the phone. And so immediately he explodes with anger. He starts yelling at her and screaming, I told you not to use the phone! You need to get off right now and go to your room! And you are grounded And he's just letting her have it. She's embarrassed, and you know she puts the phone down and starts running up the stairs. And then in that moment, he catches himself. What am I doing? I'm gonna lose my kids. Leanne, honey, I'm so sorry. His daughter freezes on the stairs. She can't believe it. He catches himself, changes his tone of voice, owns his mistake, and he starts apologizing to her. Do you think, Leanne, that you can forgive me? She can't believe what she's hearing, but she turns around, runs down the stairs, and jumps in his arm, and they have a hug. Because just in that moment, he built that bridge that he was tearing down. Just by simply being self-aware, catching himself, and making the correction. See, personal growth does not mean being perfect. It just means that we are growing in our self-awareness, knowing ourselves, catching ourselves like this father did, and making the growth self-correction. And adjustment. Another way of thinking about this or putting this personal growth, maturity, immaturity into perspective is by being authentic. We want to be authentic with our kids, with ourselves, starting with ourselves. Here's an illustration from the book Our Grandchildren Redesigned by author Michael Bess.

He says, Authenticity.

Know thyself, advised the Oracle at Delphi. Implicit in this adage lies an acknowledgment that humans possess a unique ability: the capacity to be fake. This is not so much a matter of deliberately deceiving other people, such as when one wears a disguise or mask. It has more to do with deceiving ourselves, coming to believe in a deluded fashion that we are someone we are not, or that we should try to become someone different than the person we really are. Authenticity requires that we critically be aware of this slippery, slippery dual nature of our personhood, and that we aspire to be more than just a chameleon-like creature constantly adapting our identity to conform to the external norms or models. Who is the real me? What are my deepest values and most significant personal attributes? Now here's the key question: am I living a life that reflects my inner nature. Now, in our next episode, I'm going to cover step 2 in the parent personal growth process: the power of our thoughts. You don't want to miss it. I'm Richard Ramos, and you've been listening to the Parent Whisperer Podcast. Please subscribe, Share this with a friend, and always remember: Parents on a Mission is not for bad parents, but it's for good parents who want to get better. See you next time.

So that's it for today's episode of the Parent Whisperer podcast. Head on over to Spotify, Apple, wherever. You listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $10,000 private VIP day with Richard himself. Be sure to head on over to parentwhispererpodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Richard's gift, and join us on the next episode.