Not about me

When my first child was born, he screamed. All the time. Unless I was holding him, he screamed. I couldn't put him down, couldn't give him to anyone else. I called my mums in tears, and she said, "Parenting isn't for the faint of heart!" I hear those words over and over, as this life continues to make me more than I thought I could be, to demand things I never thought I could give, to sacrifice things I have been determined to cling to. On a day-to-day basis, I feel like I haven't changed, haven't evolved at all, but when I look back to who I was six years ago, I am astonished to find I hardly recognize that person.
Perhaps the single thing I strive most to achieve: respect. More than anything else, I strive to respect my children as people. If they have the right to life--or rather, since they have the same right to life as an adult, they also have the RIGHT to the same respect as any other person. My mums, again, relating what she heard in a talk: Scripture says to "train up a child in the way HE should go," not, "the way we think he should go."
My latest discovery is Charlotte Mason. I'm just dabbling my toes in so far, but in this very amazing book For the Sake of the Children I came upon this passage:

How colorfully and scientifically our generation talks down to the little child! What insipid, stupid, dull stories are trotted out! And we don't stop there. We don't respect the children's thinking or let them come to any conclusions themselves! [emphasis added] We ply them with endless questions, the ones we've thought up, instead of being silent and letting the child's questions bubble up with interest.

She continues to talk about simply reading a group of children the creation story from Scripture, with no preface, no follow-up sermonette, no tricks or gimmicks, no tiresome quizzing and leading questions, but simply reading the story and letting them hear it for themselves and wonder at it. Doing so allows it to become theirs. How many times have we seen it, or been guilty of it--of forcing our interpretations, our vocabulary on a child, of asking them a question expecting them to give us OUR answer? You know what happens when we do this? Education becomes, not "the mysterious, exciting growth of a person", but about pleasing me. It becomes all about me.
It comes down to that again and again: It is not about me. It is not about me being able to display perfectly behaved children standing primly in a line; it is not about me making them into mini-mes, into little reflections of myself who echo my opinions and spout my preferred ideas; not about me guiding them to think the way I think or see the world the same way I do. It is not about me at all! It is about my children, and who they are. Do I know my children, or am I trying to turn them into myself? Do I know what they think, or am I more interested in shoving my own thoughts into them?
It's not about me. I want to know who they are, who God made them to be, because they cannot do His work in the world if I my main focus is to make them into myself, in order to boost my own ego and calm my own self-doubts. I need to love them as who they are created to be, and in order to do so, I need to know and love myself, so they in turn can be secure in who they are.