In this post, you will learn from my experiences some of the best methods to help grow and raise your child into one that won’t give you too much trouble, grief, worry and stress, because they will be independent, able to take care of themselves, be able to communicate to you and others.
As a father of five, and a school teacher, I would say I have a great deal of experience on raising and developing not only my own children but other people’s children. Speaking to parents on parents evening and through coaching they have the same fears, concerns and worries that I had for my children, which is how do I make them smart, independent, how can I make them so they can take care of themselves in the future, how can I make them so they can communicate properly and make the right decisions in the future.
Imagine you could dial down your fears for your child’s future down to a 1 or 2, because you invested the energy to give them the tools and skills to become an independent, confident and creative person, I know it would feel absolutely awesome, read on and I will share my experience on what has worked with my own children and with 1000’s of other children from my time in the classroom.
You might have heard people saying to expecting parents, that there’s no manual in raising a child, you’ll be fine etc., now I find that not to be that true, here’s why. Most of us have had a parent or guardian that helped to raise us, so you would have had many years of first hand experiences on how parenting works. If you had a good upbringing you would use what you experienced and try to adapt and improve on it to raise your own child. If you had a not so good upbringing, again you would learn from your experiences and try to avoid passing on what you suffered with to your child, because you know what it feels like and you don’t want your child to feel like that too.
So how does this work, well it started from my observations from adults, many people that I work with come with some sort of emotional baggage from their childhood which then gets transferred to their child. Now it could have been their parents were too strict and kept criticising them making them feel not worthy of anything, or they had parents who let them do what they want and making the child not feel worthy of love and attention, and then you have adults who had an upbringing somewhere in between.
So it comes down to understanding the development stages of the child, and the parent or adult not really understanding what those stages are. So what does this mean, it means at every age group your child is at, they understand the world differently to how you understand it. For example if your child is in the age group of 12 -24 months they don’t recognise another person’s perspective, they are not normally aware the long term it is just here and now and nothing after. So as parents when you want your child to do something or not to do something, and they do the opposite, it’s not always out of defiance, with young children its just that they don’t understand our perspective of right or wrong, or our morals, it just doesn’t register in their brain. So we get upset and sanction the child, whether scream and shout or withhold certain things, they don’t understand why they are being punished, and I used to get this a lot from my children “but why it’s so unfair”, and they just stare at you not really knowing what’s going on.
Now imagine years of this confusion and frustration, the constant punishment for doing the right thing in their mind which is how the world make sense to them. It does have an impact on the adult, it knocks their self-esteem, their confidence and their self-worth. When speaking to adults who have this emotional baggage it takes time to repair it. So why not learn the techniques in raising a more successful child. I will go through the different stages and steps in the next post.
If you do want to discuss this post or for advice on this topic please do get in touch, I would love to hear from you.