Parenting

The most important and enduring relationship that you ever enter into begins when you bring a child into the world. Every other thing will come and go but your role as a parent lasts as long as you live. The impact of your parenting can affect your child and your children’s children fro generations. Parenting is probably the most profound responsibility an adult can ever take on.

The most important single role of parenting is to love and nurture your children and to build in them feelings of high self-esteem and self-confidence. If you raise a child feeling terrific about themselves, if you bring them up full of eagerness to go out and take the world, then you have fulfilled your responsibility in the highest possible sense. Conversely, if you give your child everything of a material nature but raise him or her lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem, you have failed in your primary role.

Abraham Maslow taught that every human being has two main types of needs that they strive to fulfill. These are the need to fulfill their potentials and the need to compensate for their perceived deficiencies. Thus, a child raise without sufficient love tends to seek it all his or her life, rather than striving to realize his or her potential.

Perhaps the kindest thing a parent can do is to give his or her child the love and emotional support the child needs to grow and thrive, creating a climate in which the child feels totally loved by the most important people in his or her life. The growing child develops a healthy personality in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of love he or she receives.

Every parent wants the best for their children, but some of the parents fail to fulfill their most important requirement in raising their children by not loving them enough. There are two major reasons for the failure by parents to love their children enough. First, the parents with low self-esteem have great difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves.

The second reason is that parents often have the mistaken perception that their children exist to fulfill their expectations. A major cause of misunderstanding between parents and children is the parents’ feeling or perception that their children are failing to live up to the standard the parent expect them to be or do.
Many parents look upon their children as a form of property and they feel their children are behaving properly only when they are doing and saying what their parents want them to. If the children’s behavior differs from the parents’ expectations, the parent criticizes them.

The starting point of raising children is to realize that your children are not your property but are gift from the most high and they belong to themselves. You must understand that each child of yours is different from any other and he or she has his/her own agenda, with his/her own special talents, interests and abilities. So, your children’s job is not to conform to his/her parents’ expectations, but to grow and blossom and become whatever he/she is capable of becoming.

In the book The Prophet written by Kahlil Gibran, he says “your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. So, you may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them be like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth”.

When you look at your children as precious gifts that you can only enjoy for a short time, you see your role as a parent from a different perspective. When you celebrate and encourage the special nature and personality of your child, he or she grows like a flower in the sunshine. But if you try to get your child to be something he or she is not, your child’s spirit will die and his/her abilities for happiness and joy will shrivel like a leaf on a tree in autumn.

What your children are and what they will become will very much reflect on the kind of parent you are. Most parents blame their children when they do something that the parent doesn’t like. The parents are the primary source of a child’s behavior. In the early years of a child’s life, he/she is very reactive, the behavior they exhibit either good or bad is proportional to they way they are being treated by their parents and the people around them. When parents begin accepting responsibility for the children’s behavior, real progress becomes possible in solving difficulties the children might be having.

The most important consideration in raising children is the amount of love they receive. Children need love like flowers need water. Continuous flow of love and approval from parent to child is the child’s lifeline to emotional and physical health.