Before They Become: Developing a Leveled Mindset from the Beginning

When a child enters this world, many of the pages of their life are still unwritten. They don't arrive knowing what love looks like, how people should treat one another, what they should believe about themselves, or how they should respond to the world around them.

From the very beginning, they are watching, listening, absorbing, and learning.

Before they fully understand the words being spoken around them, they experience the actions of those around them. As they grow, they begin mimicking what they see and repeating what they hear. The people and environments surrounding them become their earliest teachers.

That means we have to think carefully about what we are placing on those first pages.

If a child is repeatedly fed negativity, criticism, chaos, unhealthy relationships, or damaging beliefs, those things can begin to feel normal and true. Children do not have the option to choose their parents or their surroundings. What they repeatedly experience can become what they understand life to be—until something teaches them differently.

I can understand that now because there were things I carried from childhood into adulthood that I didn't recognize as unhealthy until my own life experiences forced me to look at them differently. Some of the beliefs we develop when we are young can remain with us for years—not because they are true, but because they were our first version of the truth.

That's why I believe developing a leveled mindset has to begin in the early years of life.

We have to begin before they become.

Before they become husbands and wives. Before they become mothers and fathers. Before they begin choosing partners and friendships. Before they are responsible for raising another generation.

We have an opportunity to give our children something many of us had to fight to develop later in life: a healthier foundation from which to become.

When What They Witness Becomes What They Believe

Children don't always have the ability to separate what they are being taught from what is actually true. When something is repeated often enough—through words, actions, behaviors, or the environment around them—it can become part of the way they see themselves and the world around them.

A child who constantly hears that they aren't good enough may eventually start to believe it to be true. A child who grows up around unhealthy relationships may begin to believe that dysfunction is simply part of love. A child who watches adults argue or engage in explicit conversations may learn to communicate in similar ways. And a child who rarely sees healthy boundaries may enter adulthood without knowing that they are allowed to have any.

What begins as something they witness can eventually become something they display.

When No One Teaches You to Question What You Learned

One of the most difficult things about childhood beliefs is that we don't always recognize them as beliefs. Sometimes we simply accept them as the way life is supposed to be.

As children, we have no experiences to compare our lives to. We are unaware that what we witness at home is not necessarily how people should communicate in a healthy way, that the relationships we are watching may be dysfunctional, or that the things being said to us may affect the way we see ourselves. When something is all you know, it can easily become what you consider normal.

I understand that differently now because there were things I carried from my childhood into adulthood without realizing I was carrying them. I didn't stop at eighteen and suddenly examine everything I had learned and decide what I wanted to keep and what I needed to leave behind. I simply entered adulthood with the mindset I had developed up to that point.

And then life began challenging some of what I thought I knew.

Relationships challenged it. Marriage challenged it. Motherhood challenged it. Friendships challenged it. Heartbreak and loss challenged it. Even some of my own choices forced me to question things about myself that I had never thought to question before.

Eventually, I had to learn that something feeling normal to me did not necessarily make it healthy for me.

That realization changed the way I began looking at my past. Instead of only asking myself, “Why did I make that decision?” I began asking deeper questions: “Where did I learn this? What made this feel normal to me? Is this really what I believe—or is this simply what I learned?”

Those questions didn't remove my responsibility for the choices I made as an adult. They helped me understand the mindset behind some of those choices so that I could begin changing it.

And that is why I believe we have to do more than tell children how to behave. We have to help them understand why.

Teaching Them How to Think, Not Just What to Think

As adults, it can be easy to tell children what they should and shouldn't do. We give them rules, correct their behavior, and sometimes expect them to follow our instructions simply because we are the adults and they are the children.

But telling a child what to do is not the same as helping them understand why. Many parents feel as though “I told you so” is the answer to everything when it comes to their children. The bottom line is that “I told you so” is not an answer—it can leave a child with even more confusion.

If we take the time to understand ourselves and examine our own childhood experiences, we can become better at helping our children develop healthier mindsets. We have to give them opportunities to think, ask questions, express how they feel, and understand the possible consequences of their choices. They need more than instructions. They need conversations.

We should not only talk to our children about relationships; we should understand that the relationship we develop with them becomes one of their first experiences with what a relationship feels like. Before they begin developing meaningful relationships with others, we have an opportunity to show them what healthy love, communication, trust, and respect can look like.

We should talk about what healthy love looks like, what respect feels like, and what they should never have to accept in order to be loved. We should talk about friendships, boundaries, self-worth, responsibility, consequences, and the importance of being accountable for their own choices. And those conversations shouldn't begin only after something has gone wrong.

Guidance is one of the most important things we can give our children, and it is most valuable when it arrives before the lesson has to be learned through consequences.

I also believe we have to allow children to develop their own voices. Teaching them to think doesn't mean teaching them to agree with everything we believe. As they grow, they should be able to ask questions, form opinions, respectfully disagree, and eventually decide what they believe for themselves.

Our job is not to create smaller versions of ourselves.

Our job is to give them a healthier foundation from which to become themselves.

They Are Watching More Than They Are Listening

We can tell our children how we want them to behave, but our words become difficult to understand when our actions are teaching them something different.

We can tell them to respect themselves and others, but they are also watching how we treat people and how we allow people to treat us.

We can teach them about healthy relationships, but if they are watching us demonstrate unhealthy relationships, how can we expect something different from them? We can tell them not to tolerate disrespect, but if they repeatedly see us being disrespected, there is a greater chance that they may come to accept disrespect as normal.

We can teach them to communicate in a more positive way so that there is a greater likelihood of reaching a healthy resolution, but if they hear us communicate differently when we are angry, how can we expect them to demonstrate what we are teaching rather than what we are showing?

Children may mimic the lessons we intentionally teach them, but they also learn from the behaviors displayed in front of them.

This is something I understand more clearly as an adult. When I think about my own childhood, some of the lessons that stayed with me the longest were never actually spoken to me. I learned them through what I witnessed and experienced.

That realization also required me to look at myself as a parent. It is easy to look back and recognize what our parents could have done differently but even harder to ask ourselves what our own children may have witnessed from us.

There were things I didn't know when I became a mother. There were things I was still learning about myself while trying to raise a child. And because I was still developing my own understanding of relationships, love, communication, boundaries, and adulthood, I couldn't always teach what I had not yet learned myself.

That doesn't mean there wasn't love. It means love alone doesn't automatically give us all the tools we need to raise emotionally healthy children.

This is why breaking generational cycles requires more than recognizing what previous generations got wrong. At some point, we have to become willing to ask ourselves:

What am I modeling?

What are my children learning from the way I live?

Am I demonstrating the same things I am asking them to become?

Those questions are not about being a perfect parent. There are no perfect parents, just as there are no perfect children. They are about becoming more conscious of what we are placing on those pages while we still have an opportunity to influence what is being written.

Because before our children can fully understand everything we tell them, they have already begun learning from what we show them.

Guidance Without Controlling Who They Become

One of the challenges of raising children is understanding the difference between guiding them and trying to control who they become. I believe we naturally want to protect our children from making mistakes, disappointment, pain, and sometimes even the lessons we had to learn the hard way. But protection can become control when we don't leave room for them to develop their own thoughts, personalities, interests, and voices.

Our children are not born to become smaller versions of us.

They may share our features, mannerisms, and even some of our personality traits, but they are still individuals. As they grow, they will develop their own thoughts, dreams, interests, relationships, and ways of seeing the world.

Our responsibility is to help develop the foundation—not dictate every detail of who they become.

Sometimes, as parents, we can unknowingly place our own fears, disappointments, and unfinished dreams onto our children. We may discourage something because it frightens us, push them toward something because we wish we had done it ourselves, or expect them to make the choices we believe we would make if we had another opportunity.

But their life is not our opportunity to relive ours differently.

Our experiences should give us wisdom to share with them, not a blueprint that requires them to live exactly as we would choose.

There will also be times when our children make decisions we don't agree with. They may choose a career we wouldn't have chosen, love someone we wouldn't have selected, develop interests we don't understand, or simply see something differently than we do.

That doesn't mean we stop guiding them. It means we learn how to offer guidance without taking away their ability to think for themselves. Guidance doesn't mean control.

I believe one of the greatest gifts we can give a child is a relationship where they know they can come to us even when they know we may not agree with them. If the only time our children feel safe talking to us is when they are doing what we want them to do, they may eventually learn to tell us only what they think we want to hear.

I wish I had understood that better before I had children. I wish I had known how important it was to be more open and to create more space for honest conversations. When I think about Martin, there are times when I wonder whether being more open might have given me opportunities to offer him guidance when he needed it. I cannot know what choices he ultimately would have made, but I can acknowledge the things I wish I had understood differently as his mother.

And when our children learn that they can only come to us when they agree with us, we haven't truly created communication. We've created compliance. There is a difference.

A developed mindset should give a young person enough confidence to ask questions, enough self-awareness to recognize when something doesn't feel right, enough accountability to accept the consequences of their decisions, and enough security to know that making a mistake does not make them a failure.

The goal isn't to raise children who never make mistakes. The goal is to help them develop a mindset that allows them to learn, reassess, and make better choices when they do.

That is how we begin giving them something many of us didn't have when we entered adulthood: not all of the answers, but a healthier foundation for finding their own.

Correct the Behavior Without Damaging the Child

Children are going to make mistakes. They are going to make poor decisions, disappoint us, test boundaries, and sometimes do things we specifically told them not to do. That is part of growing, learning, and developing their own understanding of consequences.

How we respond during those moments can become another lesson they carry with them.

There is a difference between telling a child, “You made a bad decision,” and making them feel as though they are a bad person. I believe this is a difference many parents must learn. Sometimes the way we speak to our children—or even the way we raise our voices—can leave them feeling unloved, ashamed, or as though they have done something terrible, when what we may actually be witnessing is the behavior of a child who is still learning and has not yet fully matured.

There is a difference between correcting behavior and attacking character.

When children repeatedly hear words such as lazy, stupid, selfish, bad, or worthless, they may eventually stop hearing those words as descriptions of something they did and begin accepting them as descriptions of who they are.

That takes us right back to those first pages.

We have to be careful that while trying to correct a behavior, we don't write something damaging onto a child's developing sense of self.

Accountability is important. I don't believe developing a healthy mindset means protecting children from consequences or making excuses for poor choices. Children need to understand that decisions have consequences and that sometimes those consequences are uncomfortable and, in some cases, irreversible.

But accountability and humiliation are not the same thing.

We can say, “What you did was wrong, and there are consequences for that,” while still making sure a child understands, “What you did does not determine everything you are capable of becoming.”

I believe this becomes especially important as children get older. The mistakes become different. The consequences may become more serious. And sometimes their decisions may frighten, anger, disappoint, or even hurt us.

I believe those are the moments when they need guidance the most.

If a child believes that admitting a mistake will only result in shame, ridicule, screaming, or rejection, they may become more concerned with hiding the mistake than learning from it.

I think many of us carried things into adulthood that we didn't know how to talk about because we had never learned how to safely talk about difficult things.

That's something we have the opportunity to change.

A leveled mindset doesn't teach a child that they will never fall. It helps give them the tools to understand why they fell, take responsibility for it, learn from it, and know that they can still get back up and keep going.

Breaking the Cycle Before It Reaches Another Generation

At some point, we have to recognize that everything passed down to us does not have to be passed down through us.

Some of the things we learned as children may have come from parents who were doing the best they could with what they knew. They may have been raising children while still carrying wounds, beliefs, fears, and behaviors from their own childhoods. And their parents may have been doing the same thing.

That is how cycles continue from one generation to the next.

Not everything passed down through generations is intentional. Sometimes people simply repeat what was normal to them because no one ever taught them to question it.

I can look back at my own life now and recognize things differently than I could when I was younger. I can see behaviors I learned, things I accepted, choices I made, and situations I once considered normal because I didn't yet have the experience or understanding to see them differently.

But once we begin to recognize those things, we have a choice.

We can continue repeating them, or we can become intentional about changing what the next generation receives from us.

Breaking a generational cycle doesn't mean blaming our parents for everything that happened in our lives. It also doesn't mean blaming ourselves for everything our children may have experienced. It means becoming aware enough to recognize what needs to change and responsible enough to begin changing it.

Sometimes that may require us to apologize to our children, which is something that appears to be difficult for many parents. It's okay to admit when you're wrong to your children. In fact, I believe it is healthy for them to see us acknowledge when we are wrong, apologize for it, and take responsibility for our actions.

There may be moments when we have to say, “I didn't handle that the right way.” Or “I understand now that I should have listened more.” Or even, “I was wrong.”

I don't believe admitting our mistakes takes away our authority as parents. I believe it can teach our children something valuable about accountability.

How can we teach them to acknowledge their mistakes if they never see us acknowledge ours?

And perhaps that is one of the greatest ways we begin changing generational patterns. We stop pretending that being the adult means always being right, and we begin showing our children what growth actually looks like.

We let them see us learn.

We let them see us change.

We let them see us apologize.

And we let them see that becoming better does not require pretending we have always gotten everything right.

Breaking a cycle doesn't mean rewriting the pages that have already been written. It means becoming intentional about what gets written on the pages that come next.

That is why I believe we have to begin before they become.

Before unhealthy behaviors become their normal. Before someone else's treatment of them determines their worth. Before silence becomes their way of dealing with pain. Before they begin repeating patterns they don't yet understand.

We may not be able to give our children a perfect beginning, but we can work toward giving them a healthier foundation for a happier life—and sometimes changing what happens next begins with being willing to change what we are doing now.

Before They Become

When I look back over my own life, I understand now that many of the things I had to learn as an adult began much earlier than I realized. Some beliefs had to be questioned. Some behaviors had to be changed. Some relationships taught me lessons I wish I had understood sooner. And some experiences forced me to recognize things about myself that I could no longer ignore.

I cannot go back and rewrite the beginning of my story, but I have had the ability to change the destination of my path.

I cannot change everything I witnessed as a child, every decision I made as a young woman, or every mistake I made as a mother. I can only take what those experiences have taught me and decide what I am going to do with that knowledge.

And maybe that is part of what becoming a Leveled Woman means.

We stop allowing our past to become only a place where we revisit our pain and begin using it as a place from which we can gather the wisdom to grow and change.

When we know better, we have an opportunity to do better—not perfectly, but intentionally.

Our children will have their own journeys. They will make choices we wouldn't make. They will experience disappointment. They will make mistakes. They will have their hearts broken. There will be lessons that, no matter how much we want to protect them, they will still have to learn for themselves.

But they don't have to begin those journeys without a foundation.

We can give them conversations we may not have had. We can teach them to question what doesn't feel healthy. We can show them what respect looks like by respecting them. We can teach accountability by being accountable ourselves. We can allow them to make mistakes without making them believe they are mistakes. And we can create relationships with them that make it easier for them to come to us when life becomes difficult.

We cannot prepare our children for every experience they will encounter, but we can help prepare the mindset they will carry into those experiences.

That is the difference I understand now.

The goal isn't to write every page of their story for them. Those pages belong to them.

Our responsibility is to be conscious of what we place on the pages we are privileged to help shape—and to give them the tools, confidence, love, guidance, and wisdom they will need when the pen eventually becomes their own.

Maybe one day they will look back at their childhood and recognize things they wish we had done differently. We have to leave room for that too. Becoming more intentional does not make us perfect parents. It simply means we were willing to learn, grow, and try to give them something healthier than what we knew before.

Because if we want the next generation to build healthier relationships, make wiser choices, understand their worth, communicate differently, and break cycles that have existed for generations, we cannot wait until adulthood to begin teaching them.

We have to begin while those first pages are still being written.

We have to begin before they become.