Perhaps it has always been this way, but recently it seems that parents are under attack. The criticisms come from all sides. They are over-involved or overly permissive. They fail to teach traditions and values. They over-diagnose, over-medicate, and over-accommodate our kids, often to excuse their own poor parenting.
Especially, the critics believe, their children are indulged. Like curling athletes, they try to smooth their path through life, eliminating any friction. They are afraid of their tantrums, afraid to let them fail (and then learn from their mistakes) and afraid to say, “No.”
As a result, they are told, their children are “spoiled rotten” – rude, disrespectful, and unwilling to help with even the most basic chores. Some critics suggest that the problem is deeper – that children now believe in their own (undeserved) specialness and importance, and they are unprepared for the inevitable challenges and disappointments they will face as adults.
They may be too indulgent. More fundamentally, they are too stressed – more burdened and more alone. Both children and parents now have fewer places to turn when they are in need of practical and emotional support. Most parents want more for their children than individual achievement. They also want them to be “good kids” – children who act with kindness and generosity toward their families, their friends, and their communities.
Too often, however, families get stuck. Concerned and caring parents become, against their best intentions, angry and critical. And children, in turn, become argumentative and stubborn, or secretive and withdrawn. These vicious cycles of criticism and defiance then undermine children’s initiative, confidence, and sense of responsibility.
Here are the essential elements of a balanced, supportive approach to raising successful and caring children. It is not either/or. You can encourage your children’s self-expression and also teach them self-restraint.
• You support children with your warm and enthusiastic encouragement of their interests and talents.
• You offer support to children when you listen patiently and sympathetically to their concerns and their grievances, and when you are willing to repair the conflicts that occur, inevitably, in our relationships. Children learn invaluable lessons from moments of repair. They learn that, although it is not always easy, moments of anger and misunderstanding are moments and can be repaired.
• You provide emotional support for your children when you accept and value their feelings – and then talk with them about the needs and feelings of others.
• You support children when you play and work with them often. Essential social skills are learned in the course of playful interactions. They are not learned in front of a screen, or from lectures and admonishments. When parents play and work with their children, children come to understand and accept, deeply and for the right reasons, the limitations imposed by adult authority. Even 5 minutes a day of interactive play between parents and children is helpful in strengthening parent-child relationships and promoting cooperative behavior in young children.
In many ways, interactive play is to children’s social development what talking with children is to their vocabulary development and what exercise is to their physical development.
• Then, you help them solve problems. When you engage children in the solution of a problem, they become less stuck in making demands or continuing the argument. They begin to think, if just for that minute, less about how to get their way and, instead, about how to solve a problem – about how their needs and the needs of others can be reconciled, an important life lesson, for sure.
• And you should let them know that you are proud of them, for their effort and for the good things they do for others. A child’s confident expectation that her parents are proud of her is an essential good feeling, and an anchor that sustains her in moments of discouragement, temptation, and self-doubt.
In these ways, you strengthen our children’s inner resources and you become an inner presence – a voice of encouragement and moral guidance. Your children will then be more successful in all aspects of their lives. They will have better peer relationships. At home, you will see less argument, less defiance, and less withdrawal. They will also work harder and achieve more in school. And you will have prepared them, as best you can, for coping with the challenges and responsibilities they will face as adults.
Source:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pride-and-joy/201304/in-defense-parents