Parenting

To start off, I am not a parent and I don't know the true and real struggles of parenting but after this weeks lesson I have learned a lot about parenting styles and the purpose of parenting. So what are your thoughts on the purpose of parenting? In my own opinion, the purpose of parenting is to help children be ready and prepared to go out and live on their own one day and to help them learn useful skills that they will need for their future. According to Dr. Michael Hopkins, the purpose of parenting is to protect and prepare children to survive and thrive in the world they will live in. Notice that it isn't the world that WE live in. The world is constantly changing every 10 years and so our children will be living in a completely different world than what we grew up in, so as we are raising them and teaching them the skills that they will need for their future it will be important.

One of the most important things to teach children growing into young adults is to be responsible. By helping children understand being responsible for their belongings it can help them throughout the rest of their life. According to Google, responsibility means the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something. Children need to feel responsible over what they own or what is theirs. By feeling the responsibility that comes with taking care of their own belongings the children can learn what happens when they don't treat their things nice and the consequences of it.

Another thing that can help with parenting is spending a lot of time with your kids and helping them feel comfortable and confident enough to talk to you about different things. The more time you have to spend with your children will help your relationship be stronger and they will know that they can trust you in talking about anything. That is one thing that children need from their parents, is contact from their parents. Any kind of contact is something that the children desperately need whether that is physical contact and verbal contact. When children receive the contact that they need, it fulfills some need that they have. When they are having a bad day and just need some physical contact, a good hug would greatly help them fulfill the need of physical contact. Learning to tell when they have a need is something that comes with spending time with them as well. You get to know them and their personality then when those challenges come along you can tell what need they need to be fulfilled.

Some ways to tell when their might be a need that needs to be fulfilled is by attributes that they are showing in their daily attitudes. Some could be undue attention seeking, rebellion, trying to control others, and many others. When teens are seeking for attention, they are trying to comfort themselves because of a lack in a specific need. In my own life, I went through this stage and learned how to overcome and grow from what seeking attention could do to my own self-esteem. When seeking attention, it fulfills the need in the moment but then in the end your esteem is really just the same as it was before you sought out the attention. I learned through my own experience, that what I really needed to be doing was turning to my parents who could help me better than anyone else could. They could help me in a long-term way rather than in the moment help.
Parenting is one thing that I look forward a lot to in life and I can not wait for the day that I become a mom. Spending lots of time with your children is something that is so important not only for your relationship with your child but for your child's development as well.