One of the reasons why I have so much sympathy for children is the fact that they are innocent, helpless souls. Imagine the fact that a newborn baby is a tabula rasa. Tabula rasa is a theory that postulates that the human mind at birth is a blank slate. Thereafter, ideas are imprinted on it through experience, perception, and external impressions. The implication of this is that parents are at liberty to write on that blank slate as they choose. The slate is the mind of your child. You can write or create impressions on that mind from the time of birth, either through your positive interactions with him or through your neglect and abuse.
Unfortunately, not all parents take advantage of this unique opportunity for positive impact. Many parents, through ignorance, willful or careless neglect, give room for many deeply negative impressions in the minds of their children. Many times, this comes back to haunt the parents and, more particularly, the child for the rest of his life.
Because of the helpless situation of children at birth and during their growing years, their fate depends on the decisions parents take on their behalf. In addition, many personal decisions parents make for themselves have an impact, negative or positive, on their children’s welfare.
The following are a few areas where parental decisions work either for the good or against children.
Parenting Education
The decision parents make to acquire or refuse parenting education will have an impact on the psychological, social, and physical well-being of their children. Whether parents learn how to parent their children or whether they ignore several opportunities to get informed about effective parenting principles, will have a direct impact on how well their children are parented. Many parents neglect how to properly parent their children because of laziness, ignorance, and an unwillingness to pay the price required to be properly guided or trained in good parenting. Such parents usually realize their mistake when it’s too late. By the time their children become adults, they realize they have only raised broken or damaged children.
On the other hand, the children of parents who set aside the time to properly learn the ropes of parenting are better adjusted to life, feel more emotionally secure, and grow up to become responsible adults. One of the greatest favors you can do your children is to take the time to properly learn how to parent them. This will require that you participate in many of the parenting education programs we offer at ParentingEdge. These include our webinars, podcasts, courses, and several rich articles that we publish on this website.
Nurturing Communication
Your decision and commitment as a parent to engage in positive, nurturing communication or interaction with your children will have a great impact on their sense of wellbeing and self-confidence. Parents who constantly talk down on their children and bitterly criticize them for every little mistake will end up destroying their self-confidence. You can, by your singular decision to consistently positively interact with your children as much as possible, ensure they grow up confident in their relationships with other people. On the contrary, parents who believe that children are only to be seen and not heard are setting them up to become people who lack basic self-confidence and a sense of self-worth. Constantly punishing your children for one offense or the other makes them look perpetually harassed, even long after they become adults.
Choice of Schools
Not having the ability to decide on the right school to send your children to is definitely going to have serious consequences on their educational success. As children attain school age, they are rarely involved in the decision of which school to attend. This is because, by the time they are ready to start school, they are too young to be part of the decision-making process. Parents who take this decision must know the right schools to send their children to at every point in time in their educational career. In this regard, expensive schools do not necessarily transform into good schools. A lack of knowledge of the criteria to consider in the choice of schools for your children may lead you to make the wrong choice. This will most certainly be an academic setback for your children. If remedial actions are not taken at the appropriate time, they may, as employees, turn out to be incompetent or not well-grounded in their chosen field of endeavor.
Marriage
Whether parents decide to maintain a loving, stable, and happy marital relationship with their spouse or not, will have a tremendous impact on the well-being of their children. Children who grow up in a loving, nurturing, and conflict-free environment have an advantage over children from dysfunctional homes. Dysfunctional homes are characterized by constant conflicts, the exchange of harsh and abusive words between parents, domestic violence, separation, or divorce. Children raised in dysfunctional homes have very little opportunity to escape the attendant emotional trauma, which leaves indelible negative impressions in their minds. Children whose parents were divorced are more likely to end up divorced themselves than children who were nurtured in stable homes.
Parents’ Personal LifeStyle
The personal lifestyle choices parents make, unknown to them, have a direct impact on their children’s welfare. A father who constantly gets drunk may soon damage his health and leave his children fatherless while they are still very young. Parents who indulge in immoral and extra-marital sexual affairs may transmit the same habit to their children. It may not even matter if the children know about the affairs or not. Through a mysterious process of transference of spirit, these children may eventually assume the same immoral attitude. Parents who do not imbibe a personal lifestyle that guarantees their continuous good health may eventually become a physical and financial burden on their grownup children. This happens as they try to restore their parents to good health.
It is important for you as a parent to seriously weigh your decisions before you make them, knowing that whatever decision you make will likely affect your whole family. The interests of your children should be paramount in your mind. It is generally unadvisable for parents to make decisions recklessly, including financial decisions.
The foregoing are just a few areas where parents should endeavor to make the right decisions to ensure the utmost interests of their children. For other effective parenting tips, strategies, ideas, and principles, kindly subscribe to our programs.
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