Awakening into an increasingly expansive awareness of one’s surroundings as well as one’s own influence on the world is one of the greatest joys in growing up. Life, in this sense, is an ever-expanding spiral of scope and influence, beginning with the small seed of potential and ending in a glorious culmination of a lifetime of blessing.

Some find themselves in a state of suspended animation, where progress and development halted for one reason or another. The natural process of continual growth is blocked and the individual struggles to maintain relevance in a world that appears to be leaving him in the dust.

Parents have an enormous responsibility in stewarded their children through the earliest, and trickiest years. Young children are quite dependent on true and balanced guidance as they begin to align their moral compasses and weave the fabric of their character and sadly enough, many children end up being raised by intellectual and emotional children in adult bodies, a fact that makes maturation in season much less likely.

I overheard some parents discussing their young children’s problems the other day and the conversation was quite revealing. They mentioned that their children saw themselves more as peers than as dependents, which made disciplining them extremely challenging and frustrating. They described the various techniques used – taking a toy away, time out, stern conversations, spankings and the like – and expressed their amazement that none seemed to impress the children sufficiently to respect them.

Discipline, in both senses of the word, is largely an invisible matter. What you do visibly (the various aforementioned techniques) are merely the surface of the ocean. What is unseen below is far more important in determining how effective you will be as a parent providing a point of control. The quality and consistency of your own unseen influence is the most important, yet most often overlooked aspect of parenting.

William George Jordan offers invaluable insight into the power of your personal influence – visible and invisible – in these final paragraphs from Chapter 3:

“Discouragement often comes to honest souls trying to live the best they can, in the thought that they are doing so little good in the world. Trifles unnoted by us may be links in the chain of some great purpose. In 1797, William Godwin wrote “The Inquirer,” a collection of revolutionary essays on morals and politics. This book influenced Thomas Malthus to write his Essay on Population, published in 1798. Malthus’ book suggested to Charles Darwin a point of view upon which he devoted many years of his life, resulting, in 1859, in the publication of The Origin of Species,–the most influential book of the nineteenth century, a book that has revolutionized all science. These were but three links of influence extending over sixty years. It might be possible to trace this genealogy of influence back from Godwin, through generation and generation, to the word or act of some shepherd in early Britain, watching his flock upon the hills, living his quiet life, and dying with the thought that he had done nothing to help the world.

Men and women have duties to others,–and duties to themselves. In justice to ourselves we should refuse to live in an atmosphere that keeps us from living our best. If the fault be in us, we should master it. If it be the personal influence of others that, like a noxious vapor, kills our best impulses, we should remove from that influence,–if we can possibly move without forsaking duties. If it be wrong to move, then we should take strong doses of moral quinine to counteract the malaria of influence. It is not what those around us do for us that counts,–it is what they are to us. We carry our house-plants from one window to another to give them the proper heat, light, air and moisture. Should we not be at least as careful of ourselves?

To make our influence felt we must live our faith, we must practice what we believe. A magnet does not attract iron, as iron. It must first convert the iron into another magnet before it can attract it. It is useless for a parent to try to teach gentleness to her children when she herself is cross and irritable. The child who is told to be truthful and who hears a parent lie cleverly to escape some little social unpleasantness is not going to cling very zealously to truth. The parent’s words say “don’t lie,” the influence of the parent’s life says “do lie.” No man can ever isolate himself to evade this constant power of influence, as no single corpuscle can rebel and escape from the general course of the blood. No individual is so insignificant as to be without influence. The changes in our varying moods are all recorded in the delicate barometers of the lives of others. We should ever let our influence filter through human love and sympathy. We should not be merely an influence,–we should be an inspiration. By our very presence we should be a tower of strength to the hungering human souls around us.”

Your life is rightly a catalyst for change, in the present moment and well into the future. Take care not to judge your influence on a snapshot in time, for it will reverberate through the unwritten pages of the future in ways that you could hardly imagine possible.

You cannot foresee all that your life will touch, but you can rest assured that all that emanates from you – both seen and unseen – will have an influence. The question is: will your influence inspire others to rise up or will it magnify the uglier aspects of the increasingly depressing human condition?