Parenting

Today I’m going to talk about parenting do’s and don’ts as well as my upbringing. There is a very specific parenting technique that I want to talk about known as gentle parenting. There are a lot of people who think that the process of gentle parenting is not punishing your kids when in fact it’s the opposite. Gentle parenting focuses on your child’s needs rather than your reaction. Say for example your child broke a lamp with a ball they were playing with in the house after you told them not to play with it inside. A reactive parent would most likely yell at their kid and take away the toy or send them to their room. With gentle parenting, the first initial reaction should be to check and make sure the child is safe and away from the glass. The next step would be to have the child help clean up the mess and teach them about natural consequences. It can be hard to do gentle parenting because as children, most of us learned to be reactive from our parents. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken and often times it’s hard to change something that has hurt us in the past. Kids are still learning how to be human and they don’t always act logically so decisions they make may not always make sense to us because as adults we are already fully developed. But that is exactly why they need to be approached with patients and understanding, fear shouldn’t be their first reaction when they do something wrong, the need to correct and evaluate should be. 

Other parenting styles work, but in my opinion are not as effective. For example my parents were very authoritative in their parenting style. I want to be clear, I have a wonderful relationship with them now that I’ve kind of moved out, but in high school it was really rocky. Often times I would have a very hard time turning in assignments, and it tanked my grade a lot of the times. Even when I was all caught up on things, if my teacher put something in as missing when it just hadn’t been graded yet, I would have my phone taken away from me. Which at the time was my only way to communicate with friends. When I got to college, I didn’t retain the skills of turning things in on time. My grades tanked and I ended up having to pay for college because of it. I didn’t learn to be a good student until I got to college because I wasn’t properly taught that lesson. Before I only did good in school so that I didn’t get negative attention from my parents, now I do good because I don’t want to pay for my classes. I had to learn the natural consequences of my actions for me to actually succeed. At the end of the day, our child’s success, self worth, and development should be our top priority when they are learning a hard lesson. We can’t give them an unrelated or unreasonable punishment to something that has nothing to do with the problem, and reaction’s can’t be intense or scary to the child. If the goal is to prepare them for the real world, we need to take their learning one step at a time. Even if a mistake they made is expensive or hurtful to someone, at the end of the day it’s still a mistake and they should be able to learn how to make it better and pick up the pieces instead of running and hiding from it.