Let me tell you about someone I know. I'll call her Jane to protect her identity.

The man in Jane’s life (let's call him Joe) has some definite ideas about how Jane should behave. In fact, one might call him controlling. During the week he forces her into a confined space for many hours of the day. She is not allowed to move much at all (even if her legs are cramping and her back is aching). He keeps her doing menial tasks that have no meaning or significance in her life and allows her out of this confined space for only a few short intervals just to have something to eat and briefly stretch her legs. She has no voice in his world. She has no autonomy. In fact, most of the time she even has to ask his permission to use the bathroom.

There has been a huge movement over the past couple of years around how we can manifest things into our lives by using the power of our thoughts. Many of us watched “The Secret” or read about “The Law of Attraction” and we've bought into a lie about the power of our thoughts to manipulate the future into giving us what we do want and avoiding what we don't want. This idea can then create fear and anxiety around what we think and what might happen to ourselves and our children if we don't get it right. It can also lead to blaming and shaming as we assume that when bad things happen to people it is somehow their fault for not being more vigilant with their internal world.
 
I know that manifesting things with your thoughts is a myth because:

We tend to think of parenting as a happy endeavor. Even though research tells us that in most countries people with kids are less happy than those without, we know that we have the one-up on those childless couples because we are fulfilled!
 
But what if parenting isn’t fulfilling for you? Or what if that fulfillment isn’t enough? What if becoming a parent was the worst decision you ever made?

For 40 years I thought the trick to winning Monopoly was to buy up Jan Smuts and Eloff Street (yes, we still play the old version), put hotels on them and wait. It’s a slow game, but you usually get there eventually if the other player hasn’t bought up the rest of the board in the meantime. Then, one day as I was researching how to use board games to teach maths to kids I came across a site that knocked my hotels right over to the other side of the board. What I learned was that you can use statistics to win Monopoly. The secret is this...

Children are one of life’s great gifts in terms of feedback that help us to expand our knowledge of ourselves and challenge us to become more open and self-aware. If we’re open to their feedback and challenges, then we, in turn, can help them to come to a deeper self-knowledge and understanding, and so we grow in tandem. Nowhere have I found this to be more profound in my own life than my journey with giftedness.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask. And the quality of your parenting follows the same rules. Every time you ask a question, your mind goes seeking for the answers and in so doing shapes your reality.