In parenting - as in any other human endavour - it is important for the parents to be clear about what they want when it comes to their children's overall welfare and to keep their focus there, i.e. to focus on what they want and not on the lack of it. Most importantly, they need to teach their children that.

What you focus upon expand. If you focus on what you want, you can be almost certain that you will achieve it. If you focus on what you don’t want, you are bound to get more of it in your life even if you don’t like it. With parenting, if you focus on how you would like your children to be or to behave, you will be a very helping agent in getting them to be as you hope for them. If you focus on what you don’t like in/with them, they are very likely to exhibit more of the behaviour you don’t like.

More often than not, when parents complain about one of their children’s “bad” behaviour, they fail to see their own roles in creating and/or perpetuating this behaviour. The biggest factor that affects children is their parents’ hal [1]. Let’s take an example to clarify this:

A young father called and said, "My son is wetting the bed, and he's too big for that. I've tried everything I know, and I'm at my wit's end. I don't know what to do."

And we said, When you come into the bedroom in the morning, what happens? And he said, "I come in, and right away I know it has happened again; I can tell by the odour in the room." And we said, And how do you feel at that point? And he said, "I feel disappointed, and then angry, and then frustrated, because it keeps going on, and I don't know what to do about it."

And we said, Aha! You are perpetuating the bed-wetting. He asked, "What should I do?" And we said, What do you say to your little boy? and he said, "I tell him to get out of those wet clothes and get into the bathtub. I tell him he's too big for this; we've talked about it before." And we said, When you enter the room and feel the negative emotion as you realize that what you do not want has occurred again, stop and ask yourself what it is you do want and get your thoughts focused upon that before you go further into the experience of your son, and you will then see the improvement in what happens.

So, we asked this father what it was that he wanted. He said, "I want my little one to wake up happy and dry and proud of himself, and not embarrassed."

We said, Good. As you are thinking those sorts of thoughts, then what is oozing out of you will be in harmony with what you want, not out of harmony. And you will be more positively, powerfully influencing your little one, also. And then, words will come out of you such as, "Oh, this is part of growing up. All of us have been through this. And you are growing up very fast. Now get out of those wet clothes and get in the bathtub."

This young father called very soon after that, within a few weeks, and said that the bed-wetting had stopped.”[2]

The idea is simple. If you focus on what you don’t want or don’t like, you are not permitting yourself to see alternatives and thus you are likely to create more of what you don’t like. This point is important to keep in mind when dealing with young children since they don’t have the mental resources to find alternatives on their own. Also they are greatly influenced by their parents’ hal. If that hal is negative, the children are unlikely to exhibit positive changes on their own [3].

salam,
Ahmad

Footnotes
[1] The Arabic word hal can be translated as state. One's hal reflects one’s thoughts & feelings.
[2] From the book "Ask and It is Given” by Esther & Jerry Hicks, with some brief editing.
[3] In most instances, through Gods’ grace, there is a positive presence in the life of each child. It can come from grand parents, other older siblings, neighbours, teachers or even friends. The best positive and most influential presence is obviously that of the parents and especially that of the mother in the very first years of any child’s life.