Over the years as I have been developing my philosophy of
parenting, I have come to determine several things I think are very important.
The first is:
There is outside of the issues of abuse/neglect in the realm
of normal parenting there is no such thing as a good or a bad parent. Parents
are either effective or ineffective. The children of effective parents grow to
become adults who know who they are, what goals they have or want to achieve,
how they want to live in society, and are independent thinkers who can make
good decisions. This is what every parent wants to help their children grow
into. I have come to think there are six things effective parents need to
possess and pass onto to their children.
1.
Authenticity
The ability to live life true to yourself
determined by your own sense of values and lived out by aligning belief, thought,
feeling, words, and actions.
2.
Emotional Regulation
The ability to recognize how you are
feeling and to not allow those feelings to control your behavior and actions.
Rather choosing to only make decisions when you are in a calm and rational
frame of mind.
3.
Communication/Listening
The ability to
clearly share thoughts, expectations, and constructive criticism in order to help
children to understand and be able to predict with 100% accuracy the resists pf
disobedience and bad behavior choices. This also involves listening paying attention
to body language, voice inflection, facial expression, and other nonverbal cues
to know what your child is trying to tell you. This involves asking open-ended questions
to probe what and how they are thinking. The purpose of which is to root out
mistaken thoughts to help children think and understand getter how life works.
4.
Connection
Parents make the choice of putting
relationship above all other aspects of their parent-child relationship. Choosing
to build their relationship with every encounter especially when discipline is
required.
5.
Discipline
Parents recognize the ultimate tool of
discipline is to help children to develop the skills to control their own behavior.
They use predetermined rules and consequences to set boundaries to help their
children operate and make age appropriate decisions within the boundaries. When
the boundaries are breeched they use emotionally regulated communication and
listening to have a conversation about the breech and examine with their child
the thought process which allowed them to ignore the boundary and discuss where
the mistake was made and how to make a better decisions in the future. They then
apply the consequence. Once the consequence has been satisfied, they move to
speak the child’s love language to repair any breech to the relationship.
6
Growth
Growth
These parents recognize they need to
unders5tand more and more about kids how they think, where they might be mistaken
in thinking and hoe to help them. They also recognize they may need support in
a variety of areas; they seek help. They read books, take classes, hire
parenting coaches, attend workshops and seminars on different topics and are
constantly looking for ways to consistently improve in all the above areas.
They own the fact tha5t the parent-child relationship is their responsibility
and take seriously the needs their children have for them to be effective.
I say that every parent who chooses to can have a happy,
healthy, deeply emotionally connected lifelong relationship with each child if
they choose. The above six steps outline the way these relationships are achieved.
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