The 4 Most Essential Parenting Lessons To Get Right
It’s hard to raise children, and there’s no question about it. It’s effortless for people who have never undertaken this task to sit by the sidelines and question everything a parent might do. Still, unless you are responsible for a whole human being, it’s hard to know how effective it we’d be. Even if we do our best to get everything right, we will make mistakes. What matters, then, is knowing what to prioritize while also realizing that children have their own personalities, and cannot be fully controlled like a pet, especially not as they grow, learn and develop.
However, as a new parent or a parent of a developing teen, you can use techniques to instill the most important lessons of all and give them tools that they will use for the rest of their lives. For instance, ensuring that they are given a strong sense of morality and right and wrong is important. To use an example, totally solidifying that shoplifting is more than unacceptable may mean using a harsh disciplinary response when finding out they have tried doing this.
While there are certain guidance books out there, there is no perfect manual to help you raise a brand new human being from scratch. For that reason, it’s important to know what essential parenting lessons to get right for the health of our families. In this post, we’ll discuss four of them:
Building Confidence
It might seem as though teaching a child to listen, to sit down and be quiet, and to take instruction from their elders is the first thing you should teach them. Of course, that is true for your status as a parent and the boundaries you set caring for them. But it’s also true that as they develop, you need to build their confidence, particularly if they’re quite a shy and timid child.
Confidence can often be mistaken for arrogance, but that’s only if it’s misapplied or mislearned. Children need to build confidence in childhood, or else they will carry their sense of deferral to others, of being inadequate and in always needing an outside hand to help them well into their adult years, until they forcibly have to learn that this isn’t the best strategy from now on.
Building confidence, then, means allowing them to engage their natural curiosity while still practicing caution. For instance, that might come through helping your young teen attend a martial arts class to build confidence and familiarity with strangers while also learning a discipline and helpful skill. However you choose to achieve this is down to your discretion as a parent, but that doesn’t make this process less important to learn, provided it’s practiced incrementally.
Self-Reliance
There’s no shame in a child needing your help for something or help from those around them. In fact, teaching them that there’s zero shame in asking for help is important in helping them grow and feel less insecure about their abilities.
However, it’s also true that helping your child learn self-reliance, especially as they move into their teenage years, can be important. You might start, for instance, by teaching your child techniques to clean their room, such as how to use the vacuum cleaner, how to polish and dust, and how to make their bed. Then, you can expect them to clean their home space every week, taking pride in it, and automating a lesson they will practice for the rest of their lives.
Self-reliance, even if that means slowly teaching them to ask what they’d like for a haircut or how to pay at the convenience checkout for a snack, can help them feel more autonomous in incremental stages over time. It all makes a difference.
Knowing How & When To Behave
Of course, a child needs to know how to behave and behave with manners and respect. This involves using the right formalities, behaving around others, and caring for other people in their vicinity. It’s easy to see the children who have been taught this in their younger years and those who haven’t.
There’s also a benefit that comes when you teach your child to be respectful, at least if done right. This might even involve defending themselves or complaining when they think respect isn’t being paid back to them or when in a tough situation or accident that may even require a defense lawyer to help resolve.
Then, when they know how and when to behave, they know what conduct is necessary, even if that’s saying please and thank you to the right people. However, this way, they can also remain more articulate in their social norms, which helps them identify when that respect isn’t being paid back to them.
Embracing & Empathizing With Difference
We all have to learn that our view of looking at the world is far from the only one and to live a good and peaceful life, we have to square that with others. But, of course, not all people learn that, and we need only turn on the news to see countless examples of people failing to do so.
That said, if you can teach your child to embrace and empathize with a difference, such as disability, or the lives of different ethnicities, or perhaps those who may not be as outwardly skilled or fortunate as them, they become much better people. Moreover, they will carry those moral lessons with them.
This doesn’t mean your child has to bend over backward to be overly kind to everyone in their path, but rather, it grants the basis for a mature and independent morality they can think about themselves. If you can instill this in your child through repetition and moderating bad behavior, you can make sure they’re socially competent and mindful of whether they become the most charming person in the world. Affability is much better than charm, anyway.
With this advice, we’re sure you’ll nail the five most essential parenting lessons to get right. The fact you’re even reading this post stands you in great stead for remaining an excellent, considerate parent. Good luck!
