Now is the time to get intentional with your child rearing, dads. Lynn Wicker paves your positive parenting path.
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Anyone who’s ever been a parent, (including me) knows it’s one of the most challenging, even terrifying jobs a person can ever take on.
Yes, being a parent certainly qualifies as a job.
Not a particularly invigorating or inspirational word, is it?
Job.
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Instead, the word conjures up all sorts of other words that may include drudgery, responsibility, thankless toiling and labor.
There’s no doubt being a parent is a full-time job. But the good news is that mixed in with all of those challenges are also joy, excitement, anticipation, hope and great feelings of fulfillment.
The anticipation of planning for a child, giving birth and beginning the parent journey is one of the most exciting experiences in life. Seeing your newborn baby smiles and their blissfulness rates right at the top when it comes to feelings of contentment and genuine happiness.
And then it happens…
Somewhere along the way, we realize we have more questions than answers. We wonder what happened to all the endless bliss and exhilaration, because parenting has taken on a very different sensation.
Becoming overwhelmed, afraid, anxious and even confused is very common for all parents to experience sooner or later.
For some parents, those feelings start early while, for others, they might not show up until it’s time for those cuddly cheeks to start their formal education and leave the comforts of home.
For some, the who kidnapped my sweet, innocent child and replaced him with an alien life form? question doesn’t show up until puberty hits.
Trust me; sooner or later those feelings will happen.
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Ever wondered why it seems some parents have all the answers?
Why it looks like their kids are always clean, well behaved and on their way to perfection?
Don’t be fooled.
These parents and families may appear ideal, but I assure you no parent gets out alive without experiencing the questioning, doubts and fears accompanying a role that comes with such high stakes and that is important to each of us.
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I’ve heard it said that having a child is like watching your heart walking around outside of your body.
This is very true.
As parents, we try in vain to control all the environments, circumstances, people and experiences that might somehow injure or have a negative impact on our offspring.
After all, that’s our heart walking around out there exposed to the elements!
What hurts them hurts us.
What wounds them wounds us.
And yet, we somehow realize how futile it is to completely insulate our kids from what life holds for them, the good, the bad and the ugly. This is where frustration and anxiety begin.
In her book, Grooming the Next Generation for Success, Dani Johnson discusses the need for parents to give a great deal of thought to what they are doing to groom their kids for successful futures.
Johnson states:
“What I’ve found in the marketplace, though, is that most successful people aren’t really thinking about grooming their next generation. This, I believe has caused our nation as a whole to suffer in a few different areas. Instead of grooming our kids for success, we are grooming them for absolute mediocrity, and a generation of apathetic kids without drive, dreams, or direction is being raised. And if these unfortunate kids have parents who’ve sacrificed them on the altar of their own personal success, then these children also have entitlement issues, which is an attitude of expecting something for nothing. How sad is that?”
Point well taken.
It may be a hard pill to swallow, but we have to come to terms with the fact the same thinking that got us into a mess is not the same thinking that is going to get us out. We have to take a different approach to raising our kids, and it begins with the person in the mirror.
Johnson goes on to say,
“It only takes a few good people to step up and start doing something. Start in your home with your next generation. Groom them for success. Many are fooled into believing that they are helpless, powerless, and without the right connections to make a difference. But doing nothing is not going to fix it… Who wants to raise average, mediocre citizens who accept the status quo when the sky is actually the limit? If you don’t get them off the wrong path now, you may be intentionally setting them up for a very unsuccessful future.”
Certainly food for thought.
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There’s obviously nothing wrong with having a career, or striving to be successful.
But without intentionally parenting our kids to know that values and core beliefs are incredibly important, we may be missing some key ingredients in our parenting.
We may even find ourselves lying awake at night staring into nothingness and wondering, am I a good parent? What in the world is good parenting anyway?
I’ve given that question a great deal of thought.
I’ve been a public school educator and administrator for 30 years and I’ve spoken with literally hundreds of parents. I’ve watched carefully as they’ve interacted with their kids.
And I’ve learned so much through witnessing their ups and downs, failures and successes.
I’ve also had my own parenting experiences, some of which were my most triumphant celebrations and some, my greatest regrets.
From all of those experiences, I’ve come to understand some important things about the answer to the question, “What is good parenting?”
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Let’s start with just the basics.
Most would agree it’s pretty obvious that good parenting means providing the necessities of life…the resources your child needs just to survive, like food, shelter and clothing.
I also believe good parenting means taking an active role in the child’s life from the very beginning, learning everything you can about who they are as an individual, their personality, their interests and what they are thinking.
Building a close and meaningful relationship with your child is just as important to their success as the food and shelter you are providing.
It may seem as though believing you are doing an adequate, or even much greater than adequate, job of providing the essentials in life means you’re doing enough.
But it’s pretty clear that without building a solid, ongoing relationship with your child, you are already setting yourself up for trouble ahead.
When we hear the expressions “good parent” or “good parenting,” we need to remember they may not mean exactly the same thing as being an effective parent.
I’ve come to understand that being an effective parent means you are taking intentional actions and modeling intentional behaviors that move you toward the outcomes and successes you want your child to experience now and later in life.
Intentional actions…
Intentional behaviors…
It also sounds like, as a parent, I’m going to have to do some intentional thinking about all of this.
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I’m reminded of Thomas Edison who said, “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
I’m constantly reflecting on my behavior to determine to which one of these groups I belong.
Getting the great results we desire as a parent means we have to commit to the work of upfront thinking so we aren’t forced to contend with back-end consequences.
It’s much better as a parent to “prepare” on the front end than to “repair” on the back end.
The amazing gift we have as parents is that we get to decide how we parent.
We get to make decisions every day we’ve thought about and we can choose to take deliberate, intentional action.
The years we have been given to raise our kids fly by so quickly, but the intentional decisions we make each day are the ones that matter the most.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock