 Proper Parenting Means Learning Successful Parenting SkillsIn terms of proper parenting and successful parentingskills, a father or mother is more than just a person who loves and cares for his or her children for that tells us nothing about the quality of care. Under the traditional definition, a father that simply goes to and from work each day and says he loves and cares for his children, but does nothing else to corroborate that love and care, qualifies as a father. Successful parenting skills are not involved in this definition. From the proper parenting perspective, a more useful definition of a parent might be an adult person who in sharing a heartfelt relationship with a child, not only serves as a healthy role model for the child, but provides the emotional security and guidance necessary for that child to experience all the normal childhood developmental stages that lead to adulthood. Hence, proper parenting requires the learning of successful parenting skills. Adult, as used here, means the mother or father is a mature and responsible person, that is to say; they have successfully passed through the various childhood stages and achieved mature adulthood, not only in the legal sense, but, also, in the sense of being able to mentally and physically care for the child. By heartfelt relationship is meant that there exists an emotional bond on the part of the father and mother with their child, such that they bond to the child expecting a mutual reciprocative process of bond formation; that is to say, in return for their love, the father and mother expect the child's love. For proper parenting, a father and mother must not only be present so that the child may feel and experience his or her presence on a regular basis, but they must behave and act in a manner congruous with agreed upon healthy social behavior and ethics. This requires successful parenting skills. Emotional security refers to all those factors, too numerous to name, that cause one to feel emotionally secure, such as the satisfaction of the needs for safety, food, shelter, love, etc. Guidance refers to the entire process of teaching the child everything he or she needs to know so that he or she may successfully navigate the stages of childhood to adulthood. Hence, this would include providing the child with a good education, setting social limits and consequences for the child so that he or she may learn to become a responsible adult, and so on. Again the guidance required for proper parenting requires the learning of successful parenting skills. In our definition of proper parenting, childhood developmental stages are included, in contradistinction to human developmental stages, to stress the point they are childhood stages prior to adulthood and not adult stages. Hence, this is to emphasize that play, being part and parcel of childhood, must be encouraged, protected, and allowed to normally occur, unhampered by too early structured educational programs or by having to assume adult roles or responsibility. Successful parenting skills protect children from growing up too soon. The understanding of mother and father, as applied herein, amounts to a working, verifiable, definition of parental love. That is to say, when a mother and father fulfill the qualities mentioned in this definition, they are demonstrating their love for their child, not just in words, but in proper parenting using successful parenting skills. Love is not just a feeling. Feelings of love without action, regarding that feeling, is not love. Hence, parental love is more than just a feeling of love for one’s child, but a converting of that love into demonstrable, conscious, concerted, positive action on behalf of the child’s life, resulting in a healthier, happier child. This love does not occur by accident but through learned successful parenting skills. Hence, applying this definition, a father who truly feels he loves his child, but refuses to care for that child properly, is experiencing, not love, but a love fantasy. The mother who bares a child because she needs someone to love or someone to love her, is, also, experiencing a love fantasy for she chooses to have the child to satisfy her own selfish needs for love. The father who says to his wife that we must let our child have her way because, if we don’t, she will not love us, is not parenting, because he is not taking responsibility for his child. Extrapolating from this behavior, it can be said that the parent who refuses to set limits and consequences for the child because he or she fears being branded the bad guy and losing the child's love, is, not only shirking their fatherly or motherly responsibility, but is showing a lack of adult maturity. These people are not really adults, never mind parents, and are apt to raise children who, lacking proper boundaries, have difficulty making decisions and achieving adult goals. By not making the tough decisions, such caregivers have chosen to raise children, not for what they can give their children, but for what their children can give them. From this perspective these mothers and fathers are not proper parenting at all, but people attempting to get from their children what they failed to receive from their own mothers and fathers who lacked successful parenting skills. Summarizing the definition of parent (father, mother, child caregiver), from the proper parenting perspective:
fathers strive for but frequently prove challenging to fully achieve. Some of the successful parenting skills needed in proper parenting are the following:
successful parenting skills, is as follows:
most difficult job on the planet. Some of the exterior factors that make proper parenting so challenging are:
We end proper parenting with an enlightening article, by Dana
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