Vachon Imagined

Undisciplined parents raise undisciplined children.

Children who don’t know how to regulate themselves because they have been taught to believe everything is happening to them, rather than happening within them.

The things they hate in the world are within them.

The things that upset them are within them.

The anger they see in others is also theirs to understand.

So when children are raised by parents who are violent in their speech, violent in their tone, violent in their behavior, these are the children they become.

And some children seem to arrive already carrying something we recognize before we ever know them as alive.

The boy who is just like his father.

The girl who is just like her mother.

Or some combination of both.

We call these accidents.

We call them personality.

We call them genetics.

But some of what we call personality is simply what a child learned to become in order to survive the people who came before them.

Everyone has desire.

Everyone has anger.

Everyone has the capacity to react.

But not everyone follows the desire.

Not everyone becomes the anger.

There is a space between what we feel and what we do.

That space is where discipline lives.

You can want to scream and remain silent.

You can want to strike and walk away.

You can want to hurt someone and choose not to.

Not because the desire isn’t there.

Because you are not required to obey it.

This is what we fail to teach ourselves and then fail to teach our children.

Feel it.

See it.

Let it be there.

And then discipline.

Self-control. 

Because what is within us does not have to become what comes from us.

Undisciplined parents raise undisciplined children.

And disciplined children become adults who finally have a choice.