The truth is, when our children know our past it often provides them with a better understanding of who we are as a parent, as a person and why we do what we do or why we push the way we do.
As a child my mother was very vocal and open about your childhood years, she said that "as poor as I am, I have a legacy of memories to leave for my children". Legacy of memories indeed, I think I know my mother more than I know myself. She was never cagey about the bad or the good things that she did in her life, about the mistakes that she made, the regrets she had. And each story shared, ended with an advise. These were moments that I looked forward to. My mother, made her children her friends.
I remember she telling me about how she lied that she did not drinking ginger beer (because the truth was she loved it so much) and how every Sunday she would sneak into the kitchen to drink out the ginger beer that her Aunt made and then filled up the remainder with water so that know one would know. But she never ended their because in the midst of the story she convened of the moment she got caught after being successful for several weeks and months. She said that it was during the Easter holidays, her Aunt had asked her to watch the chicken in the pot as she went in the house to fetch something. But being daring she proceed to steal a little bit of that tasty ginger beer and as she commenced to throw it into the cup, she saw her Aunt's shadow appear. My mother said that she hurriedly tried to hide the cup but her Aunt had already seen; the next thing she knew was that she felt a hard strike in her neck back. The strike was so hard that the cup and its content fell to the ground. Though I laughed and laughed franticly, my mother quickly gave a lesson about doing things in the dark, thinking that no one would know or find out. She explained that when we do things that are wrong and don't caught we proceed to repeat the action over and over and over again until it becomes a habit, like in her case. And, when we finally get caught ("cause it will happen, we either get caught by our conscious or by someone else") the guilt and shame of it and the lose of trust from the individual did not warrant the act.
When you share your past with your child and make yourself vulnerable, they realize that you are human, it also shows your children that you are not perfect but teaches them to do the right; as they would have learnt from your errors and from your mistakes.
Growing up I gave little trouble, I dropped into little potholes as I usually pondered on the stories my mother shared with me and used them as my examples. I saw first hand, how some of the woes in her life affected her and it made me make a lot of positive decisions. Even as a teenager, I did all that I could to stay in school, to get a good education and it was strictly based on my mother's experiences. She did not need to lecture much, she taught us using her own life experiences.
So don't hide your past, especially from your children. Your life experiences can help them through their own life journey.
