Chapter 3 BREAKING THE CYCLE
This book is about “Daddyhood,” but it is also about mommy hood, aunt hood, uncle hood, grand hood or any other relationship of any kind where you are responsible for your own or another’s upbringing and safety. How these things are accomplished, and the choices that are made, will be of the most critical lifetime importance of anything else you ever do. Your choices will determine whether the chain you begin will be strong and positive or equally strong yet negative.
Your life is full of choices to be made everyday. Some are unconscious choices, but most of the choices you make each waking hour are conscious ones and these choices are ones usually passed on to your child, niece, nephew, cousin, or grandchild. When you speak to this child, are you spewing filth, stupidity and anger, or are you listening, learning and teaching? A modern philosopher once said that when we give advice, spread knowledge, or in some way pass along to another our wisdom, we are doing it for everyone. By your choices, what are you saying to a child, to the world, or about yourself?
Another very simple sounding choice we make is between right and wrong, but this is not as simple as it seems for many. These terms have, for many, become “relative” by present standards. We don’t want to seem judgmental or biased. We do not want to hurt people’s feelings or impose our values, but the fact is that, if we are to pass along decent and usable values, we have to make these decisions. The fact is we do know right from wrong even if no one has taken the time to explain. Our choices chart our destiny.
So, how do we break a cycle of bad choices, poor upbringing, abuse, and neglect? Is it even possible? Well yes, it is possible. If it were not, you wouldn’t be reading this book. It wouldn’t exist. But since you are reading it, possibilities do exist in abundance, if we look for them and use them. The following are some precepts which you may not have heard of or believed in before. Believe them.
First, get rid of the notion that things are hopeless. Your child is headed down the wrong path, the same path you may have once traveled. Are you prepared to see a poor history repeating itself through this person you love and want to protect and raise? It is time to be the adult and parent and to help this child make the decisions you know will lead to better things than you may have known. Breaking this cycle can be breaking it for all time and for the generations of your family to come, but it will be the choices you teach as well as make which will decide that. You can show disdain for the parenting process and disrespect yourself and your child or you can help them, encourage them, teach them, and make both of you better.
Secondly, don’t blame bad behavior and poor decisions on your surroundings. Bad is bad and good is good whether you live in “Good times,” USA, the ghettos of East Los Angeles