I am interested in parents thoughts and experiences and whether they agree with the following studies and views.

Children are mirrors; they reflect back to us everything we say and do. We now know that 95% of everything children learn, they learn from what is modeled for them. Only 5% of all they learn is from direct instruction. Human beings are like tape recorders. Every word we hear,everything we experience, is permanently recorded in our subconscious. Whenever adults speak,we are being role models for the children in our presence. What we speak is what we teach. Children record every word we ever say to them or in front of them. The language children grow up hearing is the language they will speak.

We often make the mistake of thinking that since children are smaller than we are and have less information and experience than we do, that they don't have all the same feelings we do. But they do. The same kind of treatment that would embarrass, humiliate or hurt us, embarrasses, humiliates and hurts children. When human beings are being hurt emotionally, our thinking shuts down. When our thinking is shut down we cannot learn, we can only record.

When adults try to "teach" children by criticizing, lecturing, shaming, ridiculing, giving orders, screaming, threatening and hitting, it shuts down their thinking so they can't learn what the adult intended to teach them to do or not to do; they can only record what is being modeled. The most common criticism I hear of young people these days is, "they don't treat anyone or anything with respect." Ironically, adults often try to teach children to be respectful by treating them disrespectfully. Children learn respect or disrespect from how we treat them and how we treat each other. When children live with disrespect, they learn disrespect. We can teach respect
only by modeling treating each other with respect and by giving children the same respect we expect.

Since children have long been treated as second class citizens, as "less than," most adults carry "recordings" of disrespect we recorded when we were children. When children's behavior challenges us, it pushes our recording's play button and we find ourselves saying the very things that were said to us as children. Has any parent not had the experience of hearing their parents' words coming out of their own mouths now that they are parents? Most disrespectful responses are so automatic, we have already said them before we even realize what we've said.

Do we have complete control or do we also follow and repeat behaviour to our partners based on the role models of our parents?