Good Parenting

Loving and caring for your child is an important part of good parenting. Good parenting is about providing a warm and secure home life, helping your child to learn the prinicples of life and to develop self-esteem. It is important to make sure that children feel secure, loved and valued and to acknowledge when they behave well.

Besides love and care, it is also essential to have discipline in the schematics of a child parent relationship. Discipline in parenting is very necessary and parenting skills can be sharpened by making room for leniency and strictness as and when rqeuired. This will make your child realize that he or she has to adhere to rules of the house and he or she cannot take your things for granted.

But this discipline should not evolve into being over protective for your children. Overpossesiveness is a sign of bad parenting. Parents must realize that by restricting a child’s movement, they are also limiting his growth as an individual. Protecting a child all the time can make him dependent on you. By not letting him take decisions by himself will also make him loose faith in his judgement.

So the idea is to teach your child to take his decisions and make him strong enough to accept responsibilty for his decisions. But at the same time, he should have a faith in you that in the event anything goes wrong, you will stand by him and support him.

Let us take the example of performance at school level. We all know world has become a very competitive place for children today. Fields like academics, sports, creative arts etc require children to perform well in various domains. There it becomes a parent’s duty to encourage his child and push him to do well so that he can get an early start in life.

But pushing children is a good thing only when done in moderation. When parents get overzealous about their child’s competition, it can have hazardous effects on the child. News of children committing suicide after bad results appears frequently. Parents should reassure their children that scoring highly or winning is not everything. It is important that a child does not feel like a failure if he does not clear an exam or competition.

Good parenting is not only about developing good behavior in children but sometimes parents need to study and modify their own behavior to have a positive impact on their kids.

One such behavior is spending habits of parents. Some parents love to pamper their children. They frequently buy them toys, new clothes, and plenty of chocolates and sweets. A parent’s spending habits are often inherited by the child. It is observed that a child, whose demands are met immediately, tends to be just as demanding at a later age as well.

Another habit that parents need to watch is how they treat other family members. Parents should not use violence in front of children. If they see adults behaving in a violent manner, they too feel that it is okay to use violence. Similarly, usage of abusive language in front of children should be avoided. Children are quick to learn and remember foul words and it is possible that they might use the same words in future.

As a parent, you have to be a role model for your child and it is no easy task. But as long as you genuinely wish the best for your child, you can actually be parent for your child.

By Arushi Aggarwal

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