What you Honor in your Child Honors You Back

What we forgot about respect, and why children naturally give it back

If you don’t honour your child, you won’t get respect back. It is that simple, and somehow we keep trying to get around it.

We say respect and mean obedience. We mean the child lowers their voice, does what they are told, doesn’t talk back. But obedience is what you get from fear, and fear only lasts as long as you are bigger and louder. Respect has an older meaning, one we forgot over time, and it has very little to do with control and much closer to honoring. To honor someone is to treat them as worthy before they have done anything to earn it. It is something that passes between two people, and children are the first to notice when it only runs in one direction.

What respect actually looks like

Respect is kindness about their emotional states, even when the state is inconvenient. A child’s feelings arrive at full size and without much warning, and the temptation is to shrink them, to say it’s not a big deal, to hurry them back to calm because their intensity is uncomfortable for us. Sometimes we feel invaded by them. Learning how to set up boundaries in our emotional sphere so that others emotional states don’t affect us, is first step. Honoring a feeling means letting it be as big as it is.

It is warmth and presence in the difficult moments, the ones where it would be easier to leave the roo or to raise our voice. Those are the moments a child learns whether closeness is something that stays when things get hard, or something that disappears the moment they are not easy to be around.

It is being able to hear the second meaning in their words. A child who says “I hate this” is rarely talking about the thing. A child who says “leave me alone” may be asking you to stay near without making them talk. Children often don’t have the language for what is underneath, so it comes out sideways, and respect is listening for what is underneath instead of answering only what was said.

Their own journey

Every child comes with their own timing, their own way of learning, their own way of being in the world. Honoring that means letting go of the picture we carried of who they would be, and of where they should be by now compared to everyone else. A child can feel when they are being measured against a standard that was never theirs. They can also feel when they are simply being seen.

Part of this is not taking things personally. Most of what a child does is not about us. The locked door, the tone, the refusal, the mood that comes out of nowhere. However how we see it, talks about us not them. So instead of taking it personally and having the child now managing our hurt on top of their own, we should reflect on what has happened and how we managed our own emotions and expectations around it.

Part of it is not overdoing. Not hovering, not fixing, not explaining everything three times, not stepping in before they have had a chance to try. All of that says, I don’t think you can handle this because I don’t think I can handle this. And trusting their abilities is the opposite message. Children feel it the moment it is there, and the moment it is missing, and they grow into whichever one they are given.

Boundaries without a fight

Respecting them does not mean having no boundaries of our own. What changes is how we hold them. Calm, and non negotiable. No raised voice, no bargaining, no waiting for the child to agree, no long justification that turns the boundary into a debate.

A boundary set from calm is simply a boundary. A boundary set from fear becomes a power struggle, and a child feels the difference immediately, long before they could ever explain it. When we hold a limit without needing to win, there is nothing to push against. And a child who is not being controlled has almost no reason to rebel.

Getting out of the controlling mind

Underneath all of this sits the controlling mind, the part of us that believes everything falls apart the moment we loosen our grip. It wants to manage the outcome, predict the child, secure the future.

Getting out of it means having faith in the flow of life. Trust that the person in front of us is on a path that is unfolding, and that we do not have to force it to unfold.

It all comes down to fundamentally respecting, honoring, the person in front of you. Do that, and you are going to be extremely respected by your kids. It truly all sums up to this.