Last night my 3 yr old daughter taught me a valuable lesson.

A message from a fellow sister Nicole:

Last night my three year old daughter was heading off to bed, and became upset, was crying and wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.

I was dashing back and forth trying to settle her and her brother down, when all of a sudden Miss 3 starts crying saying “‘i can’t do it, I can’t take it any more”.

And in this moment I felt my heart shatter. I scooped her up and held her tight and began to cry.

I’d just heard my daughter express her own self-talk and was horrified to hear my voice, my words come out of her mouth.

So now it is time to make changes, it is time for me to express love, gratitude, respect and awe for the world around me, and for myself, my soul, spirit and body. We must be mindful of our self-talk, our little ones are listening, and one day our voice will become part of their inner voice too.

We need to show our children what it is to have love, value and respect for the world around us, but it must start with us first!

A bit about Nicole:

I’m aged 22, my son Xavier aged 4.5, who has autism, intellectual impairment and a few other ‘disabilities’, and Charlotte, aged 3.5, we recently moved from Brisbane to the gold coast to get more help for my son, they/we have no family or friends around and their father has been absent for two years.

I’m incredibly close to the kids, and my values are all about family, fairness, respect, honestly and I have a long-term ‘outcome oriented’ approach to parenting, in regards to teaching and showing respect, communication, listening, manners and equality.

We face a lot of discrimination from the general public who don’t know how to respond to my son, and have been told everything from ‘you shouldn’t have had kids If you cant control them’ ‘he should/shouldn’t be doing this’ been called a ‘little shit’, had fingers pointed, been followed by strangers dirty looks and even been told by a stranger that Xavier ‘shouldn’t have been born or had his life saved by medical intervention’ – which is why I preach respect, tolerance and equality so fiercely