Once again, criticizing my 7-year-old child for something that I can’t even remember without difficulty, I caught myself thinking or even feeling: how easy and even with some kind of sadistic I do this with pleasure, and how difficult it is for me, what titanic efforts must be made in order to simply and sincerely praise him. And I felt sorry...For myself and for him. After all, for good reason, a person can only share what he himself has in abundance. Here I remember a wonderful parable with approximately the following content: one man bought himself a beautiful house with an apple orchard. And nearby lived an envious and evil neighbor. One morning a man went out onto the porch, and there was a bucket of slop. The man took a bucket, poured out the slop, cleaned the bucket until it was shiny, picked large, ripe and sweet apples into it and went to his neighbor. The neighbor, hearing a knock on the door, thought maliciously: “Finally, I’ve pissed him off!” He opens the door in anticipation of a scandal, and the man handed him a bucket of apples and said: “Whoever is rich in what, shares it!” And here is the question - indignation: how can I easily, naturally and sincerely praise a child or, for example, admire , admire and compliment an adult, if they taught me nothing except dislike and disrespect for myself, they decided for me whether I was good or bad, and raised me according to the principle - in any incomprehensible situation - criticize! And, relatively speaking, now I have inside a vessel with exclusively negative messages and negative ideas about myself, or, metaphorically, a bucket of slop. Can I give a basket of apples to the people around me?! But any child under 3-4 years old loves himself, a priori. No, like this: LOVES!!! And only adults can teach him otherwise. It feels like the desire to criticize, especially your children, is some kind of social disease. And I know, from my own experience, what work needs to be done on myself in order to at least partially recover from it: at first I tried to stop scolding myself, criticize and spread rot “in the voice of your mother,” stop the flow of “self-criticism” and learn to observe your emotions and states. But that's a slightly different story...