Week Eleven: Parenting

Now, considering I've yet to have a son or daughter of my own, I am no expert in this topic.  But despite my lack of personal experience in this field, research and class discussion has been helpful in formulating ideas and methods for parenting.  If you have good ideas as well, feel free to add your two cents or experiences to this post so I can learn more :)

First off, I want to put one of my opinions on what one of the purpose of parenting is.  I believe it is an amazing opportunity for gaining insights into God's life and to have God-like experiences.  To create life and then nurture, guide, council, and love your children is exactly what God does for us.  Also, the being a father or mother is something from which one is never released.  The amount of influence may change over time, but a father and a mother have those titles and responsibilities as their callings forever.

With that being said, I now want to look at some parenting purposes and techniques.  Hopefully these make sense...
Lets start with "responsibility".  Parents are responsible for helping their children become responsible, or response-able.  This is done by providing age appropriate choices that relate to the situations they are currently facing in life.  It is also informing and showing the natural consequences of their actions.  Children should learn as much as possible from natural occurring consequences to their actions instead of learning from consequences made up or inflicted by the parents.  Now, this isn't to say that a parent should neglectfully and knowingly let their 16 year old go to a party and drink thinking, "Once he's hammered and wakes up with a head ache not remembering what happened he'll know not to do it again," because that's the "natural consequence".  Parents also have the responsibility to help guide their children by informing them of the consequences that could happen from certain actions so they can make the wisest decisions.   This can be done by creating logical consequences as an alternative to letting the natural consequences happen.  Logical consequences are a simulation to what could happen "naturally" through experience that are related to the problem at hand.


Another element to being a successful parent is to help your children have their needs met through active parenting.  Basic needs of a child are:
1. Contact and Belonging: providing frequent and appropriate contact (hugs, kisses, hand on a shoulder, tickling, etc.) and creating a way for them to contribute to the family (because kids love to help)
2. Power: encourage responsibility, choices, and consequences
3. Protection: teach them how to be assertive and forgiving (this is most easily done by being assertive and forgiving as a parent).

There are more elements to active parenting, but I think this is a good start.