Parenting

 Hello everyone! I absolutely love this week's topic, and that's why I picked it. Parenting! Parenting is such an amazing thing that so, SO many people get to enjoy. In this blog I'm going to talk about something called active parenting and how to achieve it because in all honesty, when I heard about it, it amazed me. There are also a variety of things that your children need so my goal is to make whoever reads this aware of what those are, because they are important.

Active Parenting

Some important aspects, these can be goals too, to remember while practicing active parenting is to teach your children to have respect. If you only teach your children one thing in life, it should be to have respect. Just like everything else, you and your spouse should work as one. Confidence in parenting is the consistency of both parents, in the action as well as in the punishment. If one of you says the child can't watch tv because they didn't take the trash out like they were asked to do, and the other parent goes and gets them a candy bar anyway, that is not being consistent with each other and makes parenting a lot harder. You should be interacting with you child/children ALL OF THE TIME! This is so important. When you are constantly and consistently interacting with your children, it will allow a trust and a bond be there that is crucial to having a good relationship. Although you should be interacting with your children, this doesn't mean that you should be doing everything for them. What is your 9-year old learning when you make them a sandwhich everytime they ask for one? They're learning how to be dependent, and the goal is to teach them how to be independent. When we do things for our children what they can do for themselves, they can grow to resent us and become dependent, like I said. What you should do instead, is to happily teach them, at whatever age you think they'll learn, how to do something with you present to make any corrections. You doing this for them, instead of completely taking over for them, is teaching them to be independent.

Needs

There are a variety of needs that your children need. These "needs" include Contact and belonging, power, and protection. Not only will these things give your children direction, but if you're practicing them enough and sticking with them, they will also give you direction.

Contact and Belonging

When we talk about contact, we're talking about physical, verbal, and eye contact, because children need all the contact they can get from us parents. You should always offer affection freely and make it a normal thing everyone does in the home. If you don't give frequent contact to your children, they will most likely find it somewhere else. In order for kids to feel like they belong, they need to contribute, and it's our job to teach them how. For example, if you're doing the dishes, ask your child to help you and make it a fun thing to do together. This will really help them feel your love and for them to have a sense of belong. It's a lot harder than you think for a child to feel like they belong because you can't bother someone enough for their attention in order for you to feel like you belong. I think we all know that we as adults also need contact as well as belonging. As you tend to your child's needs in selflessness, your needs are also met. Although this is true, it doesn't mean that it should get to the point to where your child is the one taking care of you, and it's extremely important that doesn't happen. If you and your spouses relationship is healthy, you won't feel the needd of your child to be the one to take care of you. It does happen more often than you'd think so it's just important to be careful.

Power

The mistaken approach for the need of power that children have is rebellion as well as controlling others. The parental approach is choices, plus their consequences, equal their responsibility. It's important to remember that fear and respect are completely different and should never be compared or looked at as similar things.

Protection

The mistaken approach of protection is revenge and the parental approach is assertiveness and forgiveness. Teach your kids assertiveness instead of aggression. Along with this, you should be modeling forgiveness for your kids or else they will think that revenge is the only/best option when something goes wrong.

No, this is not the entire guide or set of things that children need from us parents in order to be taught the "right' way, but they sure will help. Try and practice these things on a daily basis. Think back to our parenting styles. By doing all of these things for our children, we're practicing a basic athoritative parenting style. Isn't that amazing?! Helping your children with what they need will ultimately help you as well as your family as a unit.

Thanks for the read!