We learn our parenting skills from our parents, friends and neighbors. Our examples are often poor ones that damage us. We pass the damage along to our children and their children quite naturally and we effectively handicap our children.

We can't teach them what we do not know and we know very little when we become parents. We have been taught to know only what professionals and authorities tell us. They are so often wrong about what they know, when we believe them, we accept their errors as truth. Then we are in error and we pass those errors on to our children, who believe them to be true when they become parents. To become good parents, we must know things on our own, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

We have had the ability to know since our infancy, but we are taught we cannot trust what we know. We must trust what authority tells us. By the time most of us become parents, we are no longer sure who or what to trust and we try to figure things out for ourselves, if we are even allowed the time to figure out anything beyond careers and paying bills.

At six years of age we have been taught lies about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Boogeyman, God, the Stork, the good policeman, the bad strangers and a host of traditional family lies. Adults excuse this by saying it is deceit as a fairy tale and there is no harm done. The child will learn that deception is just play acting for fun. It is true that by the time we become 10 or 12 years old, we will learn we have been deceived - lied to. This is an important message for us to learn. We cannot trust authority that will lie to us for their own amusement. This is a painful lesson. These people deceive us openly and then tell us they know what is best for us. We want to believe it but we know better. The rest of our education is designed to help us forget what we know and to "know" only what untrustworthy people teach us by their words and actions. By the time we become parents, our educations have successfully erased what we know and replaced it with what others want us to think and believe. Worst of all, we then think someone else's beliefs belong to us. We will teach and defend those beliefs.

We have been programmed to believe lies of all kinds in order to be a certain kind of citizen. One who participates by defending false beliefs and sells them to friends, neighbors and the next generation. This cycle could be easily broken by teaching parenting skills based on one simple question: What do we want for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren? What do we want to pass on for many generations? If two parents do not agree on this before they become parents, they have work to do before they become parents.

I do not speak as an expert on this matter. I have no child raising credentials to display and I made more mistakes in my 30s as a parent than I care to count. I never willingly taught lies, but all too often my sincerely held beliefs were lies that I did not hesitate to teach. Too many times I gave an answer when both of us would have been better to begin an investigation to find a probable or likely answer. I am writing my thoughts on this subject because of what I have seen and learned about the matter, over the past 40 years.

I remember a girl in my neighborhood who swore she would raise her children differently than her parents were raising her. She was pregnant and married by her 17th birthday and I was able to observe the way she raised her children. By the time the second child arrived, she was parenting on auto pilot. She was desperate and had nowhere to turn except to what she knew from her own experience. She fell back on her parents approach, carefully avoiding some of the old mistakes but repeating many more and adding her own new ones. She was not prepared to be a good mother. Her husband was unprepared to be a good father. I do not need to observe the grandchildren to know the cycle remains unbroken. When we see the harm done and the lost opportunities much modern parenting represents, we know there must be a better way and there may have been much better ways in the past.

Parents need to decide before they become parents, what kind of adults they want to create. That decision will come from core beliefs about life and the world in which we live. If we see life as threatening and the world as a dangerous place, we will teach this and how to defend against it. Time spent in defense is usually not growth time and is relatively uninspiring. Then how much time shall we spend teaching this? What kind of family do we want? Do we want children and grandchildren who will care for us when we are old and feeble? How do we create such offspring?

How do we see education? Do we see it as a formal activity for children between the age of four and twenty four? Or do we see it as an integrated part of life, to be tended when we have made time available for it? How much education do we want to provide before the children become adults? What are the most important things we need to teach in the first six years or the first twelve? By age eighteen? What values do we want them to learn? The answers to such questions provide us guidance.

Because we have had answers handed to us from infancy, we have grown up thinking the questions we ask are not important. Whatever it might be, someone will be there with an answer. We become dependent on the answer people. Professionals and authorities who are paid to give answers. In fact, most of us become dependent on others for all our needs and desires. We depend on an employer to earn wages to trade for much of what we can produce ourselves, if we would plan. But we don't plan. No one told us to do that. We might plan for a house or a car but we don't really plan our lives. Not that anyone's life closely follows the plan we may devise. But a plan provides purpose and the lack of purpose in so many lives today is proof of a spiritually retarded society.

Every day more people are discovering there is a spiritual world that is seldom taught in churches. In fact religious answer providers have come to be seen as an elite segment of society, providing us with many wrong answers. Nothing is ever quite what it seems or what it claims for itself.

(PUBLISHERS! Free Promotion Here - Now! If you will leave a comment and your URL or hyperlink on this or any article of mine: 1.) Some of my on - site readers will visit your website. 2.) I will visit your website. If I like what I find, I will write a positive review and publish it here at EzineArticles. You may delete this generous offer when re - publishing this article.)