Thursday, March 22, 2012

Parenting - How To Make The Appropriate Choices

By Arianna Spinello


When you're a parent, you find that you constantly face new situations that you have to figure out how to respond to. Without further ado, let's examine some parenting tactics that can prove useful in your day to day experiences as a parent.

Permissive parenting is the name given to a certain style of raising kids that definitely has its problems. This is a parenting style where discipline, if present at all, is kept to a minimum. If you've ever seen noisy, rambunctious kids in a public place whose parents make no attempt to reign them in, you've seen an example of this parenting style. A very permissive upbringing, unfortunately, can create all kinds of problems for kids, especially as they get older. Since kids with permissive parents aren't used to rules, limits or structure, they are in for a rude awakening when the rest of the world presents them with all kinds of limitations. Even if kids act like they don't like limits, on some level they need them to mature and to feel secure.

One horrible mistake that many parents make is trying to raise their kids the same way that their parents raised them. Unless you had ideal parents, and they were perfect in every way, you should never raise your kids the way they were brought up. Most of us were raised by parents who were well intentioned but didn't always make the best choices. Your goal, as the new parent, is to make better choices where our parents had failed. If, for example, your parents had trouble when it came to enforcing discipline, you should study this issue and make sure you didn't inherit a similar tendency.

Kids all need certain limits and rules that parents must put into place. Different rules have different purposes -some are necessary for the kids' physical well being, such as "Don't run into the street." Rules and boundaries also give children a sense of security, as they know what to expect and what is and isn't allowed. Even on relatively minor matters, children need to be guided, so when they're young they do best when they have a set time to go to bed, eat meals, do homework assignments, and when they're permitted free time. You don't want to make their lives too structured, though; the way you can strike a balance is by telling them something like, "You can either do A or B, but not both." You can tell them, for instance, that if they want dessert they have to eat their vegetables, but they might have a choice between spinach and broccoli.

Parenting is one of the more challenging tasks that most people will ever have to face. You can plan and prepare all you want, but then one day, things will all go wrong. Yet if you can stay calm and collected, and use some of the tactics we've presented in this article, you'll be able to figure out the best way to respond to most of the challenges of parenting.




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