Being an Active Parent

     Parenting is hard. Every child is different and so you may have to adjust your parenting style so that you may be able to help your child grow in the best way possible. This week in class we discussed how important it was to be an active parent in your child’s lives. 

    The reason we parent our children is so that they are prepared to become active adults in society and they know how to make wise choices in their future. One example of this is letting the natural consequences to discipline your child.  My professor gave an example of when he was 15, he was about to drive himself to school when he realized that he did not have enough gas to get there. This meant he had to either ride the bus to school or drive his mom’s car. He went inside and told his mom the situation, and his mom said, “Wow that’s too bad, what are you going to do about it?” My professor asked if he could drive her car, but she told him that would not work for her. He ended up riding the bus to school that day. The reason this was important to my professor is that his mom did not bail him out of his problem by offering to buy him gas or letting him take her car but let him experience the consequences of not filling up the gas tank the night before. I fully agree with his mom. I know from my own life how letting the natural consequences of my actions is a better teacher than if my parents bailed me out every time I was in trouble. There was this one time where it was the end of my semester in college and I decided last minute to go home for a semester. The thing is, I had already signed my contract with my apartment and to get out of it I had to pay this huge fee. I talked to my parents about it and they sympathized for me, but they didn’t offer to help me get out of my contract. In the end, I was glad they didn’t because this experience taught me a lot about learning to read contracts carefully and to take the time to make important decisions because to get out of them will cost me. Every mistake I have made in my life was painful, but I wouldn’t take them back because I was able to learn from them and make better decisions in the future. 

     I feel like a lot of parents today want to protect their children and so they end up doing a lot of things for them. But by protecting them from life, they are inadvertently setting them up for failure in their future lives. Their children won’t learn what it means to fail at something or work towards a goal because their parents stepped in and did it for them. 

    Even though letting children learn from their mistakes is the best teacher, there are three cases where it is an exception. The natural consequence will harm them, it’s too far in the future, or it will harm others.  If your child were about to put their hand on the hot stove, you as the parent will pull them away because the natural consequence is that they will get burned and receive a severe injury. For the second one, my professor gave an example of when he worked in counseling for kids who were on their way to jail, there was this one kid (18 years old) who never listened to authority and did whatever he wanted. He asked his parents how he acted in school, and they told him that their son stopped going to school since he was 13. He asked them why they allowed him to skip school and the boy’s parents told him that they figured that their son would eventually figure out that without and education that he won’t be able to get a good job or have a lasting relationship. My professor then asked them when they hoped that realization would come to their son and they said probably around 30. That was over ten years from that point, and the parents realized how silly their solution was. This is an example of when parents need to interject into the situation because the consequence of their child’s choice won’t happen soon enough to be effective. An example for the third case is your child shoplifting. They aren’t being affected personally, but the store they are stealing from is being hurt by the theft. 

    Being an active parent in our children’s lives is hard, but by doing so, we are helping them grow and develop into adults who know how to make wise decisions, which will help them in all aspects of their life in career and family.