Parenting – how to know you’re doing it right?

ParentingQUEZON City, Philippines (January 19) – Have you encountered someone who is well-disciplined, matured and contented in life? You might notice that they are also the ones who are victorious and have achieved tremendous success.  Wondering the reason how did they come up with that kind of outcome, some people don’t realize that effective and good parenting can largely contributes the success of the child.

Periods, commas, question marks and other punctuation are like small particles that occupy little spaces in a group of words. But, those groups of words are burdensome if all those punctuation have not been put in order or are missing. Those can’t convey the meaning and the message clearly because punctuation is not properly used.

Now, imagine that those punctuation are the role of the parents and those groups of words symbolize the children. However, the purpose to convey the message clearly reflects the wish of a parent to the success of their child’s development. You can see that everything is important and connected that if something lacks even in the smallest part, it will surely result in failure.

Just like in good parenting, it’s important that every parent must effectively and carefully do all their roles and responsibilities in order for their child to be satisfied with all biological, social, psychological and emotional needs. With these, children will attain the highest development and they will surely achieve success and be prepared to handle all circumstances and different situations that may come to their life.

As one of the evidence, according to the familyacts.org, “Youth who experience higher levels of parental involvement and a closer relationship with their parents are less likely to exhibit behavioral problems and to engage in risk behaviors. In addition, they tend to achieve better grades and higher levels of education and to experience better emotional health”.

All parents want the best for their children. They wish their child to be successful in all forms of life. They want their child to be happy and achieve their dreams in life. But, if parents aren’t proactive enough to all their responsibilities, they don’t understand how big they can influence their children. In that case, there will be no initiative and desire to think of strategies and ways on how they could be effective to their children.

Parents should realize that the success of their children also depends on how they teach them during their childhood days. It’s important that as their child still growing up, it’s good that they’re on their side, monitoring and teaching them the things they need to learn. Since parents are responsible for their child’s personality development, they should be careful on showing their behavior and true perceptions.

According to Stephen Covey by his book entitled, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, sometimes, parents unconsciously perceive their child as insufficient and somehow left behind. For instance, your child doesn’t perform well in school and mocked by his/her classmates due to your child’s incapable of socializing others. Considering that success is important in all forms of life then as a parent, what you’ve decided to do is to go along with your child every time they go to school and defend them whenever they are being mocked by their classmate. You always tell them positive replies whenever they will do an activity. This behavior can only just worsen your child. Why? Because your child will always depend on you and the perceived message to them is “You aren’t good enough, you can’t do anything without us, and you need to be supported all the time”.  Do you know the solution? Just don’t be so supportive and let your kids handle their situation so they could learn from it.

This gives attention to all the parents who are not aware with their actions that sometimes what they’re behaving is different from what they’re thinking.  So, it’s important to study your real perceptions and be honest to everyone that surrounds you especially to yourself so you can effectively teach your child. Just like Frank A. Clark said, “The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them”.

(written by Jasmin Monte, edited by Jay Paul Carlos, additional research by Lovely Ann Cruz)