My daughter is a bit on the quiet side, and she usually has just one or two good friends at a time. I was talking to another mom about that, and she gave me ideas for getting my daughter to branch out. I thought they sounded pretty good. But later, when I was sharing those ideas with my sister, she said, “I don’t know. You don’t want to send a message that you think there’s something wrong with her. She needs to know that you think she’s great. After all, kids spend much of their time judging people, and she has to deal with that constantly.”
That’s when I started thinking that our kids really don’t need to be fixed. They don’t need to be turned into what we perceive to be perfect versions of them. They are who they are. Of course, we should help them grow, but we don’t want them to feel like something’s wrong with them. Author Fred A. Hartley put it beautifully: “Parenting begins with a big embrace for who my child is.” In the same way our words can be used to communicate dissatisfaction with our kids’ behaviors, they can also be used to say we accept them as they are. Here are 38 things accepting mothers say to their kids.
