Emotional challenges truly won't harm children if they are taught how to handle them. Children need experiences where they can succeed and gain a sense of their own worth. It's a parent's responsibility to help the child be happy and succeed. Many parents honestly don't know how to do this.

Children of the '90s perceive life quite differently from how we adults perceived life when we were children. Effective parenting starts with first seeing how your child perceives.

By consciously practising love, a parent can intuitionally protect and guide the child into the proper angles of perception. Quality heart time is provided to encourage the child, without the head energies that cause excessive overprotection, constant stimulation, or lack of bottom-line boundaries.

Be creative; encourage enterprising growth. Respectfully and with love, lead your child into unfamiliar situations. A physical and spiritual drive toward growth dwells within all children. Growth challenges a child to depart from the known and travel into the unknown. This implies uncertainty, so movement into the unknown can trigger anxiety.

Love allows perceptions of life to unfold in an atmosphere of hope and security. A child, ages zero to seven, who learns to inhabit the Earth in a field of love will not experience the internal suffering we call frustration when moving through difficult passages in life.

It's parental love and care that make mastering the early knowledge of motor skills a fun event instead of a growing pain. Providing safe experiences translates as love-in-action for any child. Love prompts parents to re-examine the home climate they provide.

Setting boundaries with the heart intuition is solid care that enhances... The amygdala is the part of the brain that stores emotional memory, and organises what becomes "familiar'' to the child, whether coherent or incoherent. If patterns generated by the heart and blood pressure control systems are disordered and incoherent, the baby learns to expect disharmony as the familiar; thus, the child comes to feel "at home'' with incoherence, which will affect learning as the child grows.

Therefore the child will feel "comfortable'' with incoherence and will seek out and create incoherent environments and relationships as that what is familiar.

The frontal lobes of the brain are maturing rapidly in the early years up to age 3, then not again until the ages 17-21. Thus these early years are critical to the development of emotional maturity.

Under certain conditions the baby loses the ability to discern the difference between coherent and incoherent emotional states and perceives them as "the same.'' New research just released by Harvard University revealed that adults who did not feel loved as children have a much higher rate of disease. Children need real love and care.

Even an older child's brain is responsive to harmonious, coherent heart rhythms generated by love, care, and appreciation. There are many cases where a loving caretaker, foster parent, "big brother'' or mentor showed sincere care for a troubled child and this care over time enabled the child to overcome emotional and intellectual disabilities.

Caring for children This is evidenced in studies of resilient children who overcome tremendous obstacles and succeed in leading happy, intelligent, effective lives. In almost every case, the "resilient'' child gave credit to a loving relative, minister or teacher who encouraged and believed in him or her.

As parents, teachers and children learn tools to offset the increasing stress of today's world, healthier attitudes and life skills essential to success and a positive future are developed.

*** HeartMath, stress/emotional self-regulation individual and group training is available at the Coalition for the Protection of Children. The Coalition for the Protection of Children is part of The Family Resource Network Charitable Trust which consists of The Physical Abuse Centre, The Institute for Child and Family Health, P.A.R.E.N.T.S. and The Father's Resource Centre. The agencies joined in 1998 to better serve the community.