Isn't it interesting that as soon as a baby is born, the first thing we do without even thinking about it is to identify physical traits in the baby that reminds us of either parent?

Sometimes these physical traits are obvious, like particularly shaped ears. However most of the time we only see what we want to see. We all know the colour of a new-born baby's eyes and hair is not permanent. Yet we look at these physical traits and use them to make the parents feel good about their creation. We have nearly seventy muscles in our faces, and each one of us uses different combinations at different times. But when faced with a tiny baby that has been in this world only a few hours, we actually imagine that we can see a likeness to a parent in the way they use those unpractised muscles.

But then when we are faced with these beautiful creatures of God, we are so in awe that any emotional reactions can be forgiven.

When we look for the likeness to a parent, we intuitively reflect our understanding that each child is a combination of the father and mother. This is not just a combination of sperm and an ovum that results in a new person. This is a combination of the best and the worst of two souls.

We only experience this fact as the baby grows into a child and adult and displays behaviour that we feel reflect back to either parent. Where a child acts like a parent in a way that is acceptable, we like to praise the child ' "a chip off the old block". Where the child acts in an unacceptable way, of course the child is wrong and needs to be disciplined. We do not for a moment even consider that the child is still a reflection of the same two parents.

Let's assume that everything our children do and say are in fact a reflection of us as parents, like a mirror that the child holds up to us. Where a child reflects behaviour and emotions such as love and gratitude, we love that child even more. Where the child reflects any emotion or behaviour that we do not like, we reject the emotions or behaviour of the child and try to shape them by means of various types of punishment, ranging from physical punishment to emotional withdrawal. Sometimes this is so blatantly hypocritical, for example parents that smoke and drink but are very upset about their teenage children that do the same in imitation of their parents.

Other times the link to the parent is less obvious, because our children also display our hidden fears and our dark sides. For example, the child of an overly conservative parent becomes sexually promiscuous. Or a rich parent who became rich because of self-discipline and focused ambition raises a child that has only one ambition, namely to live a hedonistic life. Everyone is shocked, because the child has been raised "properly" and the parent is "good". Nobody realises that the parent needs to redress an imbalance at soul level, and that the moment it is done, both parent and child will be healed.

What if we do some introspection and identify the part of us that we dislike or want to hide, rather than judge and punish the child?

We often see our own childhoods as times where we suffered deprivation of some kind, either physically or emotionally, and we often go out of our way to ensure our children do not have the same experiences. We do not understand how our childhoods served the purpose of shaping us into the people we have become. All we remember is what we like to call deprivation, and the emotions like resentment that we like to associate with it.

When our own children are born, we want to withhold similar experiences from them, because we do not understand how those experiences redressed an imbalance in us at soul level. We then go out of our way to re-create the same imbalance to the other extreme in our children without even realising it. Then we add to this imbalance all those that we have to address in ourselves, and we are disappointed in our children when they show us what our dark side looks like. Poor children!

When we reject the behaviour of a child, we reject a part of ourselves that we regard as unacceptable or imperfect. We in fact say that God created us as a reflection of Divinity, except that God did not create our dark side. If God did not create our dark side, then who did? Did we not do that to ourselves, so that we have ourselves to blame? If God did create our dark side, then it is perfect, because God did not make a single mistake when creating this universe.

The most effective way to change unacceptable behaviour in your child is to acknowledge that behaviour or emotion in yourself and make peace with it and accept it as part of who you are. Then you can love that part of yourself as well and make a conscious effort to either change your own behaviour if your dark side is expressed in behaviour, or change your beliefs about yourself if the behaviour of your child is the opposite of the side that you normally display to the world.

Our children look just like us in more ways than we realise. We should thank God for providing them to us as teachers.