Parenting

 

"To you who are parents, I say, show love to your children. You know you love them but make certain they know it as well. They are so precious. Let them know. Call upon Heavenly Father for help as you care for their needs each day as you deal with challenges that inevitably come with parenthood. You need more than your wisdom in rearing them."

-President Thomas S. Monson

There are several ways in which parents can, and do, respond to challenging situations with their children. How can we determine the best ways in which to approach parenting challenges and opportunities?

Michael Popkins an author wrote a book called active parenting. In this book, parents learn how to be active in their children’s lives. Instead of reacting to what a child does maybe, we should be looking all along what might be the child's needs. The purposes of parenting are to protect and prepare a child to survive and thrive in the world they are going to live in. We should not focus on how to get the desired behavior out of a kid instead, we should focus on how to meet the child's needs. He talks about children's needs for development, and he mentioned four things that a child needs apart from food, shelter, and clothing.

1. Contact and Belonging.

Children who do not experience eye or physical contact or a sense of belonging fail to thrive because that significant need is not specifically met. Children tend to be behind how normal kids behave, some do not speak at an age when they are expected to, some were smaller, some are even intellectually behind. We see this not only in children but in adults as lack of physical contact in covid times has played a significant role in a rise of mental health issues. We all need some contact and a sense of belonging and when we are starved of that we fail to thrive in the world we live in.

A child's mistaken approach due to contact starvation would be undue attention-seeking. Children will seek attention so they can feed their hunger. Parents need to offer contact freely and teach kids how to contribute. When they do dishes and stuff you are telling them that they belong.

2. Need for power. Power in this case is mentioned as the ability to make choices in our lives. Two mistaken approaches of children who are not given power are rebellion and those children trying to control others. What parents need to do is to give children the power to make choices. Children need to have choices, situation-appropriate choices, and age-appropriate choices. They should be allowed to experience the natural consequences that go with those choices. As a result, altogether that makes up responsibility. We should allow our children to experience the natural consequences of their choices except if those consequences are 1. Too dangerous. 2. Lesson to be learned is too far in the future to be useful. 3. Can harm someone else.

3. Protection. A child's mistaken approach to feeling protected is revenge. People don't respect you when you get revenge on them, they get scared. A parent's response to that need is to teach our kids assertiveness + forgiveness.

4. Withdrawal. A child’s mistaken approach to that is undue avoidance. It has become so easy to avoid things when overwhelmed. As parents, we need to teach children how to take breaks for a short time and get back at it again (meaning the task that was at hand rather than avoiding it and never doing it again).

5. Challenges or a challenge. You don't feel good unless you are doing things that are difficult and so are children. A mistaken child’s approach to seeking a challenge might be to have undue risk-taking. They are always taking risks all the time because they are seeking to challenge themselves and that can be dangerous. A parent's response to meet that need is to encourage skill-building. Let them take on the challenge of learning how to play the piano or something.

Children are like little scientists who are doing experiments on how the world works. Of course, as parents we are also learning we are experimenting too. Nobody knows from the day they have a baby how to take care of them perfectly. But in our homes let us not allow children to be bosses or should I say, parents. They do not get to call all the shots when they are young. They grow at it little by little. Let us as parents try our best to create a healthy and happy environment for them to do their experiments and from those experiments comes experiences that will help them draw good conclusions.