Parenting is one job I feel I could never quit. It’s a responsibility as if fixed to a treadmill – perpetually. Even when my children as grownups, raising their families, if they seek to dip into pool of my guidance, I feel happy to lend my shoulder. If by any means it’s hinted that they were weighed down with worries, my sleep betrays, and the concern for them haunts until I hear their cheerful voices over the phone.
But my childhood had been tough on me and my psychological makeup. My dad was a strict disciplinarian with unpredictable irritability and mood swings who never withdrew his shadow of dominance upon me, even after I got married. I used to walk my days with heaviness as if tethered and the ropes held strictly and securely in his grip. I struggled for freedom, space that any excited young couple would ask for.
Looking back, the way I felt hurt, the humility I underwent, I promised to myself I would never be like my father, whom I feared and felt insecure in his presence when I was growing up. I then decided I need to adopt my own responsive parenting style with my children being liberal and appreciative. I wanted to groom them and hoped they behold me a pleasant and gentle father. Further, I wished my children to feel grateful to have me as their parent: a reason to laugh, a reason to be self-reliant.
For better or for worse, what my father showed me in his manner of authoritarian parenting when I was a child and later gave me a good reason to think, “Let me resolve how I shouldn’t dole out the same parental rules when raising my kids, I have to be the opposite of what my father was, the way I was dealt with.”
When we sow healthy emotional seeds in the child, he harvests healthy offshoots as he steps into adolescence. This is the natural law that inherently applies to any parenting technique. If parents are keen and understand this deciding precept of parenting component, it speaks about how cautious, discreet, and mindful parents have to be at every stage of their child’s growth process.
Our words, actions, behavior, and model we project at home nourish the child more than we can imagine. Children are like parched soil that hungrily absorbs water; they quickly take in whatever is directed at them. But the tender minds can’t sort out what is right or wrong; they retain the information in the realm of their innocent world. Thus, the healthy seeds sown may develop as behaviour that helps gain a positive approach, and the wrong ones do sprout but eventually may cripple and undermine his perception and personality.
It all about the language we use with the children that makes all the difference, according to the child psychologist, Dr. Haim Ginott.
When raising our children, we have to forget, throw away, and overrule the rigid ways we were treated by our parents. If we need to decide in the best interest of the child; it’s required to make an educated attempt to bring in agreeable actions and ways to build in an intimate relationship with the child, so they accept our help and solutions for many knotty issues they find unable to solve both at home and school. As contemporary parents, we must learn how to show our favors in simple caring deeds, and let the support we offer laid out as helpful conversations and words that can help them every minute, every day. We must, because we claim as parents that our children are the most important people we care about and love.