How do you know when to say yes...or no?

Well, it’s official – I’ve entered into more than one retail store over the past few days to find it transformed into a Christmas wonderland, complete with music, new staff uniforms, and a spirit of joy that doesn’t seem to come at any other time of the year.

But wait a minute…

Didn’t we JUST have Halloween?

I suppose it’s inevitable that the stores are always going to seem to start Christmas earlier every year – particularly this year when they’re so eager to get a jump over the somewhat dismal performance of recent economic downturn.

As much as I enjoy the early holiday spirit, I notice that it always seems to call for an increase of targeted advertising – particularly relating to children. One of the areas I’ve seen this most is among the mobile phone companies, who seem to be targeting younger and younger audiences all the time.

While these ad campaigns used to have a clear target of mostly teens and twenty-something’s, they’ve now shifted over to the ‘tween’ sector. The actors in the ads are younger – there’s even one ad that has a tween asking her dad if he signed her up for a calling plan yet. In another, the entire family is in the car with both kids in the backseat – the younger one is texting while the teen is arguing with her mom about expired minutes!

Last year, my daughter began to ask for her own mobile phone.  Her asking became begging, and her begging became desperate acts of pleading and yearning. But throughout all this desperate pleading, she could not actually tell me why she wanted a mobile phone – other than repeating, “Everyone has one – and they are cool!”

The truth was, there wasn’t really a need for her to have a cell phone. She is on a closed campus during the day for school, and has access to the office telephone should she need to contact me. When not at school, she’s with me. Despite her arguments of, “Other people in my class have one mom – it’s just not fair!” she did not get a mobile telephone. I did not feel in alignment with giving her a mobile phone, so she did not get one.

Even more importantly than my alignment with her having one, it was very clear to me that she was really not in alignment with having one. She could not give me any real reason that she wanted one, other than everyone else has one, and they are cool

It can be such a difficult struggle when your child asks you for things like this. It can feel like you’re asking your child to earn his or her wellbeing. It can feel like ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’.

But it doesn’t have to feel like any of that.

Many times parents struggle with saying, “Yes, here is the money, go buy this or that.” It can be difficult to give openly. Yet many parents know that by virtue of Spirit (God, Buddha, Law of Attraction – whatever feels best for you) all things are possible. After all, if you have the means to give to your child and you don’t think that what he or she is asking for is harmful, why not?

What I have come to realize is that when I continue to give and give, it feels as though I am saying, “I am doing this for you because I do not believe that you are capable of doing it for yourself.” That is a contradiction that I am feeling within myself.

I have also come to realize that I want to be a path of inspiration for my child – I do not want to be the only way in which her wellbeing flows.

• Now, I pay attention to how I am feeling when my daughter asks me for something.
• I ask her why she wants what she wants.
• I remind her to pay attention to her own feelings, because they are her built-in guidance system – her very own GPS.

When she is asking from a place of pure expectation and she can give me reasons why she wants what she wants AND she is asking with the knowing that what she wants will come to her – not necessarily through me – but it will come, then I know she is in alignment with herself and the object of her desire.

But if she gets out of whack – gets wonky or sideways with her energy and in her asking; if she comes from a place of, ‘you won’t give it to me, so what’s the point’, or if she is asking to fill a void or asking because the other kids will think she is cool, that would be off. I can feel the difference in her place of asking.

It is at that point that I need to go to my own guidance system. If I ignore my own guidance system and give her what she wants because she is nagging me to do so, when her asking is off, I am actually doing her a dis-service – a HUGE dis-service!

So what do I do?

I lovingly say to her: “I promised that I would never do anything with regard to you that feels even the slightest bit off.”

I explain to her that it’s important to tune into her own GPS and recognize whether she is asking from a place of feeling good about asking, knowing that what she is asking for will come to her, rather than a place of begging and pleading and being fearful that she will not get what she is asking for – that she doesn’t want to come from a place of being needy, because coming from that place makes it harder to get what she is wanting.

I also let her know that if I can make the whole idea of a mobile phone feel good to me, then we will move forward with the idea – but I don’t move forward with anything if it feels even the slightest bit off. I check in with my own guidance system and I give to her from my desire to give, not from a sense of responsibility or ‘giving in’ just to stop the nagging – and that feels really good to me and her.

And yes – my daughter now has her mobile phone. She got to a point where she could easily list out the whys behind the reason she wanted one – none of which included anything remotely close to ‘because it will make me cool’.

Ahhh, yes – being able to use my own guidance system and teaching my daughter how to tune into her own GPS made this an easy manifestation for both myself and my daughter in the end.

Getting your kids to tune in this way isn’t nearly as difficult as you may think. A lot of it begins with getting yourself to that place first – just like you would put the oxygen mask on yourself first in an airplane – setting yourself up to be ABLE to help the ones around you who need it.

If you want to find out how to tune into your own guidance and start getting your kids to find that GPS system of their own, I invite you to listen in on this audio – The Magnetism of the Awakening Parent – a one-hour tele-training that will teach you how to begin this process of blissful transformation within your own family.

As the holiday season approaches, wouldn’t it be nice to have these systems in place for yourself and your family before chaos even has a chance to ensue?

This could be your best holiday yet…