During my teens, I naively thought that my lack of self-worth was due to poor parenting. (Sorry Mum and Dad.) This led me to believe that to ensure my children could led magnificent lives, all I had to do was never let my children feel the way I did.

In essence, my strategy was to save them from experiencing any negative emotions, by loading them with good ones.

Newsflash! I was so very wrong.

Being a parent without understanding the role that emotions play in the running our minds and the creation of our lives, makes it fricken’ hard.

If I take a bird’s eye view and analyse the changes in parenting over the three generations I’ve been around, I can see that every generation takes on a new theory. These solutions are developed in a similar way to mine… way before I had the needed perspective to conclude anything.

My parents’ generation attributed their shortcomings to a lack of opportunity due to societal biases. So they worked hard to give us opportunity in the form of education. For my generation, a lot of us concluded that our deficiencies were due to a lack of love, so I worked incredible hard to ensure that my children constantly felt loved.

At no point did I suspect that the real issue lies in our inability to use our emotions positively. When we can’t do that, hard emotions feel like deficiencies. We look for what we believe is the likely source of the issue, but we miss that there is a whole different purpose and way of using these important parts of us.

Genius You teaches that no emotion is bad, neither do they signal personality or character flaws. We don’t need to rescue or protect our kids from them. We need to teach them to use them as deciphering tools that build our understanding of how we and others work. We can use them to protect ourselves, fix issues and enhance relationships, but only when we learn how to harness them as the elegant tools they are!

By protecting my kids from emotions, I temporarily looked like a great parent because I had a happy kid. But, I actually instilled in them the inability to use their greatest navigating tool.

Our children need all their emotions to become fully magnificent. The genius thing about teaching our children, is that we must learn the lessons first. There is no get out of jail free card. We can’t teach our kids what they need to know, until we know ourselves.

Rosie’s story is Genius You parenting in action! Rosie learnt that every hard experience can led to some of life’s sweetest moments.