There’s a phrase that goes, “The child’s behavior is not a sign of good parenting. The parent’s behavior is a sign of truly exceptional parenting.” The most significant effect on a child’s growth is their parents. They are their child’s first teachers and leave an indelible effect. Whatever a child learns in his early years stays with him throughout his life.
Parenting tips can be good and can be bad! However, no parent would give any wrong advice to their children.
Your beliefs, attitudes, and actions influence your child’s life objectives and outlook. Your child’s demeanor reveals a lot about how you have treated him. This is why good parenting is so important. But how do you determine the difference between good and bad parenting?
Here Are a Few Suggestions for Becoming a Better Parent, Learning Good Parenting Skills, and Avoiding Bad Parenting :
Allow your children to be bored and refrain from being their playmates. Allow them to have a few toys (not many), many books, and large periods of time without lessons, practices, or screens. Use the time you would have spent entertaining your children to pursue your own interests and enjoy your own life (and let them see you doing that).
When your children complain about being bored, offer to fill their time with chores or teach them how to entertain themselves. Reading, playing, making a fort out of blankets and chairs in the basement, running around the yard playing superheroes, wrestling the dog and each other, daydreaming, reading, etc.
But, for the most part, they’ll be using their minds to imagine, play, read, and learn about the world, themselves, and other people, how we all fit together, and where they fit within that puzzle. Providing children with plenty of unstructured time is enriching and beneficial to their mental health. It’s the perfect blank canvas for them to thrive and grow.
Solving children’s boredom, whether by becoming their regular playmates or by stopping their whining with a plethora of classes and organized sports, causes a slew of other issues, some of which are immediate and some of which are long-term.
Immediately, your children’s lives begin to resemble the worst parts of our own: over-scheduled, too busy, burdened with other people’s expectations and demands, insufficient sleep or time for what we actually enjoy doing, and no opportunity for creativity (unless it’s specifically required, say, on Thursdays at 4–5, and don’t forget to bring a smock because you’ll be coming from soccer and you can’t get paint on your uniform).
Adults call this “stress,” and we’re constantly trying to manage it with drinks, food, shopping, or little windows of time dedicated to “self-care,” or by meditation or yoga, and so on. This is not a life that our children require.
Being our children’s playmates or play directors, and being overly involved in their free time, causes a subtle problem later in life when these children become teenagers and young adults. The adults around them have lived far too similar to their own: everything in adults’ lives revolves around children.
Adults are getting down on the floor to play with dolls or games, planning daily kid-centered activities, preparing kid-friendly meals and snacks, driving children to violin, Mandarin, and coding classes, and soccer, karate, and chess practice. Adult life apart from children appears to be mostly drudgery to children: work, chores, managing and serving children, and guzzling coffee while complaining about how tired we are.
It’s not surprising that there’s little incentive for children to grow up and become adults these days. We’ve made our children’s lives seem more interesting and important than our own by making their entertainment our daily responsibility. Why should anyone ever grow up when they have all the fun and none of the responsibilities of perpetual immaturity?
Boredom is harmless, and it allows young brains to stretch and grow. Surrounded by interesting adults who are happily pursuing their own hobbies and passions, children see that adulthood has its own charms and freedoms that make the responsibilities worthwhile.
Conclusion:
The good news is that, while parenthood is challenging, it is also extremely gratifying. The bad news is that the benefits frequently follow the hard work. But if we give it our all now, we will reap the benefits later and have nothing to regret.
To a Wonderful Parenting Experience!