People with a lot of unfinished business from their own childhood don’t do well with kids.
From my experience with kids and watching others with kids, it would seem that’s the number one cause of doing so poorly with children. Still, even with some moral damage in your soul, it’s not so very hard to find a path you can walk.
Kids are people, but they aren’t adults. You cannot hold out adult expectations until you properly equip them. Then you have to repeat that time and time again until it sticks. Kids have a different link to their own subconscious minds — less cluttered but also less experienced. So they can often see with perfect clarity but may not know what they are seeing. They blurt out some of the most precociously accurate observations and a moment later show total confusion when something inside them shouts a perplexing message. You are working to guide them across the challenges of living in a fallen world, and you can help them only with the things you know. That’s good enough. Most children are fully able and willing to walk in your peace if you have any.
The biggest single hurdle to working with children is remembering what it feels like to be a child. If you haven’t worked through a substantial part of the wreckage of your own childhood, it’s pretty tough to be in touch with your inner child. You don’t have a good grasp on the pathways of a child’s mind because you haven’t finished growing up in all areas. Some parts of you have left the others way behind. There is no integration, only jolting discontinuity. You are an alien to yourself.
There are lots of ways people damage themselves by avoiding the process. It’s not as if you have to go back and redo it all, but you have to revisit trauma and come to terms with things most of us would rather forget. If you’ve ever used mind-bending substances, you’ve committed a form of psychic burglary in raiding places you can’t rightly enter. It only makes things worse; take the time to find the keys. The human soul is fully capable of searching itself without such abuse, but you have to do it right and find the path that works for you.
You don’t have to become a teacher or work with children professionally to be good at dealing with them. As an introvert, I still managed to work as a public and private school teacher and not go berserk. It was work I should not have been doing, but it wasn’t complicated by difficulty with kids. The problem was my own nature and capacities after having dealt with much of my unfinished business.
Only when you are generally grown up in your self, generally integrated with all your parts within hailing distance of each other, can you safely return to that territory of childhood so as to interact with kids.
Addenda: In response to an off-line query, I must note that most of the common models break down quickly in the real world. Unless you live in some place like Lebanon where people might find shrapnel in their morning breakfast, restrictions are not the starting assumption of child-rearing. It’s a fallacy to assume the necessity of tight controls. You don’t start with hard outlines for kids any more than you would with adults. That’s the approach of a child who never matured beyond the thinking of a six-year-old. The adult moral approach is that you give them full liberty within the very weak boundaries you have to set for your own imperatives. Tell the kids as much as you can about why those boundaries exist. Don’t be afraid to say, “I have to have it this way” versus the fallacious, “This is what everyone has to do.”
Make them aware of social orthodox obligations, but don’t use that as an excuse to restrict them. You aren’t stamping out an assembly-line product. You are doing your best to launch a new life into the world with their own unique ideas and sense of calling. Point them to that vision consciously and even verbally, if you can. This is where having a really broken soul makes it nearly impossible to be effective.
