As simple as it gets...


Understanding the Parenting Role

Parenting: the essential role in child development

No-one has a greater role to play in child development than a child's parents.

It is essential, therefore, that every parent is equipped with both the knowledge and the tools to full-realise the parenting role.

Understanding the Parenting Role in Child Development

The basic mathematics:

Therefore, if we add sleep and parenting time together we are responsible for inputting into our child's brain for 7540 hours, in other words, 86% of the time. When we realise that our brain takes in every input into every one of our five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), we then see why the job of parenting is so difficult!

Most, if not all, of the problems children have lies within us as parents and therefore the first step in parenting is the self-awareness of ourselves, to carefully examine our attitudes beliefs and actions to see if we require changing them.

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Take a child who is overweight: who controls the supermarket trolley, the child? I think not!

This statement appears to be simplistic, all that you have to do is to say no to your child's demand for high calorie foods. It is simplistic, because it sidesteps the awesome power that our children have over us. Especially when they are small, when the looks up at us and asks with a selection of looks that could melt the hardest of people, often when we, as parents, have yielded to their demands we need to reflect on the power they have.

However, this is where we all have a misconception of the word love, love is the most powerful force known to us humans. If we could recall into our mind a vision of our child when they are eighteen struggling with their weight can we honestly say that we love our children when we overdose them on sweets and chocolates?

All children are sponges when they are born, they take in all information we give them directly and indirectly, good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. They have no power to filter the material with objective reasoning they just absorb it all. For example, children mimic the smoking habits of parents who smoke, in their toddler-play they will put a pencil in their mouth to copy the cigarette, so the seeds of the smoking habit is already programmed in their young brains and they could not reason the disastrous consequences of the habit. This applies to everything they receive whether it is directly from us as parents or from the television. It is for this reason that the bringing up of children is probably the most complex job we will ever do!

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So, let us go back to our time equation; we see that all children are in some way a function of inputs over time. When our children's behaviour is not acceptable, we should investigate where they obtained the information that was at the core of that behaviour. It is also for this reason why we, as parents, are responsible directly for our child's learning and not the school. Let us remind you of the school parent equation again. They are at school in the classroom for 853 hours, we as parents have them for 4640 hours on a one to one basis. If, as we have said, children are sponges from where do you think they will get the majority of information?

Frequently, parents unwittingly undo a great deal of the inputs they receive from school. Few parents know how to support their learning child. We carried out a research programme that involved interviewing over 17,000 parents, less than 5% knew how to design an effective support strategy for to support their child's learning.

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