Life Skills Development/Unit One/Relationships/Lesson
/*Parenting*/
/==What is Parenting?== Parenting is the process of raising and educating a child from conception until adulthood. This is usually done in a child's family by the mother and father (i.e., the biological parents). Where parents are unable or unwilling to provide this care, it is usually taken on by close relatives (including older siblings) and grandparents, adoptive parents, foster parents, godparents, or institutions (such as group homes or orphanages). Parens patriae refers to the public policy power of the state to usurp the rights of the natural parent, legal guardian or informal caregiver, and to act as the parent of any child or individual who is in need of protection (i.e. if the child's caregiver is exceedingly violent or dangerous).
Contents
What makes a person a good parent?
Being a good parent means creating a loving, safe environment for your children as they grow from baby to toddler, right through to the teenage years. You'll need different skills for each stage, but at all times your child will depend on you. You'll become the expert on your child and on what they need to grow into happy, healthy adults.
Loving your child, with no strings attached, is the most important thing you can do. But you'll also have to make a huge number of decisions about the best way to bring up your child. Of course this responsibility brings joy and excitement - but it can be overwhelming, frustrating or even boring at times. Most people manage these emotional and practical challenges with a mixture of love help from relatives and friends, good advice, common sense and luck.
Question: Can poor parenting lead to psychiatric disorders in children? Answer: Yes, say investigators from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In an 18-year-long study of nearly 600 families, they found that kids who grew up with neglectful or abusive parents were significantly more likely to have mental problems later in life, regardless of whether there was a history of mental disease in their immediate family. Researchers began the study in 1975 when they identified 593 families in two New York counties who were taking part in the Children in the Community Study. The average age of the children at the time was 6 years old. Maladaptive parental behaviour — defined by factors such as inconsistent enforcement of rules, loud arguments between parents, difficulty controlling anger at the child, low educational expectations, verbal abuse, etc. — was assessed via psychosocial and psychiatric interviews at the beginning of the study and then again in 1983, 1985-1986, and 1991-1993. Results showed that most of the kids who experienced high levels of maladaptive parenting during childhood suffered from psychiatric disorders in adolescence or early adulthood. The researchers also found higher levels of maladaptive parenting among parents with psychiatric disorders. Children with parents who had psychiatric disorders but were still good parents fared no worse than those with parents who exhibited neither signs of mental illness nor poor parenting skills.
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Child development: stages and how child learns Question: What is learning? Answer: Learning is to gain knowledge, understanding, or skill. (This is in accordance with the great Webster.) An even broader definition of learning is "any permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of a practice or an experience." This makes what is taught to our children even more important as it has the potential to have a lasting affect in their behaviour.
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Question: How do children think? Answer: Children are a bundle of ideas and thoughts. If you ever really look at your child you will see that these thought patterns are much different from that of an adult and can certainly be expressed in much different ways. Therefore, there are four different stages of learning or development that each child experiences. 1. Sensorimotor This is from the ages of birth to about two years old. During this time the child's primary mode of learning occurs through the five senses. S/he learns to experience environment. The child touches things, holds, looks, listens, tastes, feels, bangs, and shakes everything in sight. For this child the sense of time is now and the sense of space is here. When the child adds motor skills such as creeping, crawling, and walking--watch out--his/her environment expands by leaps and bounds. The child is now exploring their environment with both senses and the ability to get around. This just doubled your job as a parent because now you need to start dealing with such things as protection and guidance. This mode of learning actually continues through the age of twelve, but becomes less acute as the years go by.
This is the stage between ages two and seven. During this stage the child is busy gathering information or learning, and then trying to figure out ways that they can use what they have learned to begin solving problems. During this stage of his/her life your child will be thinking in specifics and will find it very difficult to generalise anything. An example would be a ball: A ball is not something that you use to play a game; it is just something that you throw. This is the time when a child learns by asking questions. You will begin to think that if you hear the word ‘why’ just one more time that you will go crazy. The child generally will not want a real answer to his question at this point. For example, when he asks ‘why do we have grass?’ - He simply wants to know that it is for him to play in. No technical answers for now. The child in this age group judges everything on the ‘me’ basis - How does it affect me? Do I like it? You get the idea! This child also has no ability to go back in time and reason. If you miss your opportunity to explain or punish when it happens - forget it for they have.
This is the period of time when your child is between the ages of seven to ten or eleven. This is a wonderful age as this is when children begin to manipulate data mentally. They take the information at hand and begin to define, compare, and contrast it. They, however, still think concretely. If you were to ask a pre-operations child, "How does God hear prayer?" They would most likely answer that He has big ears. The concrete child would put a little more thought into it and answer something like this: "God is smart and he made some special earphones just so He could hear me." The concrete operational child is capable of logical thought. This child still learns through their senses, but no longer relies on only them to teach him. He now thinks as well. A good teacher for this age group would start each lesson at a concrete level and then move toward a generalized level. An example of this would be:
4. Formal Operations Period This period begins at about age eleven. At this time the child will break through the barrier of literalism and move on to thinking in more abstract terms. He no longer restricts thinking to time and space. This child now starts to reflect, hypothesize, and theorize. He actually thinks about thinking. In the formal operation period, children need to develop cognitive abilities. The following is a list of six simple categories of cognitive abilities:
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Question: What are some key learning facts? Answer:
The older children your child gets, the more capable s/he is of learning and storing information. The older our children get the more responsible we become in helping them to fine tune their new found capabilities.
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Question: What are the stages in child development? Answer: Stages of development in children: 4 years
5 years
6 years
7 years
8 years
9 years
10 years
11-12 Years
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Question: What are some tips on parenting teenagers? Answer: Perhaps the only thing more difficult than being a teenager is parenting one. While hormones, the struggle for independence, peer pressure, and an emerging identity wreak havoc in the soul of the adolescent, issues of how much autonomy to grant, how much "attitude" to take, what kind of discipline is effective, which issues are worth fighting about, and how to talk to offspring-turned-alien challenge parental creativity, patience, and courage. If adolescence can be conceptualized as a journey from childhood to adulthood, parenting adolescents can also be thought of as a journey. To guide a child to adulthood, to ingrain values, to help negotiate social relationships, and to see new ideas, ideals, goals, and independence emerge in a child can be the adventure of a lifetime. Like any adventure, the thrill is in the journey. Challenges conquered sweeten success, and while failure is in part unavoidable, no one can know how the balance of success and failure measures out until the journey is complete. As long as the journey continues, there is hope: a chance to turn failures into success, weaknesses to strengths. Like any adventure, the challenges are unique to each traveler. Even the same parent will experience different challenges as each child is guided through adolescence. Because each journey is unique, there is no way to smooth all the bumps, anticipate all the challenges, or detonate all the land mines beforehand. However, there are aspects of the journey that appear to be universal. Although teenagers will make their own choices, a good home life can increase the odds that kids will avoid many of the pitfalls of adolescence. Particularly, a kind, warm, solid relationship with parents who demonstrate respect for their children, an interest in their children's activities, and set firm boundaries for those activities may directly or indirectly deter criminal activity, illegal drug and alcohol use, negative peer pressure, delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and low self-esteem. There is not only growing consensus that some parenting techniques are better than others, but also contribute to the development of emotional stability and social responsibility in children. There are three major areas that are crucial to the parent-adolescent relationship – connection, monitoring, and psychological autonomy.
Encouraging independent thinking and the expression of original ideas and beliefs, validating feelings, and expressing unconditional love are ways to nurture psychological autonomy. The opposite of psychological autonomy is psychological control, which is characterized by changing the subject, making personal attacks, withdrawing love, or inducing guilt to constrain intellectual, emotional, or psychological expression by the adolescent that is incongruent with the parent's way of thinking. Adolescents who report that their parents are likely to use techniques associated with psychological control are more apt to struggle with depression and to exhibit anti-social behavior. The combination of connection, monitoring, and psychological autonomy may sound simple, but the simplicity of the directions can be frustrating to navigators when they are lost. Translating general ideas into specific behaviors, and then into patterns of interaction can be a challenge, especially if one or both parties are already entrenched in less productive patterns of interaction. The task of establishing a warm, caring, positive, relationship characterized by kindness with a teenager whose favourite phrases are "you just don't understand" and "leave me alone" can be daunting. While it is true that one of the main developmental tasks of adolescence is to separate from parents, and that peer influence takes on greater and greater importance during teen years, there is still no substitute for the parent-teen relationship. It is important to spend time with teenagers. Parents who wish to enhance their connection with their teenager often find that choosing leisure activities wisely can do much to further the cause. In addition to the opportunity to spend time together amiably, engaging teenagers in fun activities that foster sportsmanship, service, creativity, intellectual development, etiquette, honesty, and respect for each other brings all of those aspects into the parent-child relationship, providing an enjoyable forum for both teenagers and parents to practice those skills with one another. Engaging in recreational activities with teenagers is a way to connect regularly in a pleasant setting. Regular, positive interaction is crucial if discipline is to be effective. When the parent/child relationship is built on a foundation of warmth and kindness, it can withstand the unpleasantness of discipline. Parties to relationships void of such a foundation often either disengage or become conflicted in the face of the uncomfortable consequences imposed by discipline. Spending leisure time together also gives parents a leg-up on the monitoring process. First, it cuts down on the amount of free time kids spend without supervision. Second, discussions about friends and other leisure activities tend to come up easily, and can be discussed in a relaxed atmosphere. Often, parents get a chance to know their teenager's friends through recreational activities, either by attending school or team performances in which their child is involved with friends, or by allowing a child to invite a friend along on a family outing. Perhaps the most difficult thing about the monitoring process is that it is a delicate balance between too much and too little, and it requires the energy to set firm limits when it would just be easier to let things slide. It requires continued vigilance on the part of parents to ensure that they know where children are and what they are doing. It also requires that parents enforce consequences when family rules are broken. Although discipline is genuinely unpleasant for all involved, attention to monitoring activities and providing consequences for inappropriate behavior on a daily basis will alleviate major heartache later. Parents should remember that the prime directive of adolescence ("independence or bust") prohibits teenagers from admitting that having parents set firm boundaries is actually reassuring. Adolescence is a time of change and upheaval. Family rules and boundaries can provide a sense of stability to teens that are struggling to decipher relationships, roles, and even their own personalities. Although they may protest loudly against being required to live up to certain standards, when they have a hand in crafting those standards, and when those standards are demanding but fair, teenagers will flourish. Having something steady, firm, and predictable in a head-spinning world is like being handed a map, with NORTH plainly marked. Clear boundaries and standards are the gauge by which all other information is measured. Disciplining teenagers is difficult, but it is critical if teens are to learn that their behavior has consequences. Engaging children in the process of setting the rules can eliminate some of the odiousness of enforcing rules and assigning consequences before the rules are broken. When parents include teenagers in establishing clear rules about appropriate behavior and consequences, the arguments over rules and punishment can be brought to an end. Children can no longer claim that punishments or expectations are unfair, and parents can take on the role of calmly enforcing the pre-arranged consequences instead of having to impress upon the child the seriousness of the problem and scramble to find an appropriate punishment. The temptation to react emotionally when children break rules is alleviated because a breach of the rules is no longer perceived as an assault on parental authority, since it is by the authority of the family, not the authority of the parents, that the rules were established. Helping to set the rules may not dissuade teenagers from breaking them sometimes, but it can help parents to avoid a power struggle with their teenagers. Another big trap in parent-teen relationships is the confusion of psychological control (the opposite of psychological autonomy) with discipline. Demanding a certain level of behavior of children does not exclude allowing, or even encouraging them to think and express opinions different than one's own. Too many parents get caught up in focusing on controlling their child, believing that controlling the way their child thinks will translate into controlling what their child does. By using guilt, withdrawing love, or invalidating feelings or beliefs, the parent hopes to make the child see things the parent's way, ensuring compliance with parental expectations. There is a fine line here; one of the roles of parents is to help children make sense of the world by offering explanations or interpretations of events. It is when these parental offerings take on the tone of exclusiveness – when parents cannot respectfully consider and discuss a teenager's interpretation of his or her own experience – that psychological control has taken over. Parents should also be aware that it is the teenager's perspective on the forcefulness of the suggestion that counts. Psychological control is damaging if the teenager, regardless of parental intention, perceives it as excessive. While a parent may feel that a discussion has taken on the tone of a healthy debate, to a teenager the same interchange can feel absolutely crushing. Interestingly, boys are more likely to report that their parents squelch their psychological autonomy than are girls. Whether this is a difference in the way parents actually relate to teenage boys versus teenage girls, or whether it is a difference in perception of boys versus girls is unclear. When discipline becomes a matter of calmly enforcing family rules about behavior, many of the problems associated with psychological control are alleviated. When children have a problem with delinquency, parents generally tend to respond to it with less behavioral control, and more psychological control as time goes by. This appears to set up a vicious cycle, as teenagers respond to both lack of monitoring and the presence of psychological control by acting out or becoming more delinquent. If parents can break this cycle by treating delinquent behavior with increased monitoring rather than attempting to control it by inducing guilt, withdrawing love, or other means of psychological control, teenagers are more likely to respond with better behavior. In short, parents who concentrate on trying to control their child's behavior rather than trying to control their child are going to have much more success and a lot less grief. Parents, who expect that children will sometimes act in ways that are inappropriate or undesirable, but prepare for such behavior by involving their children in the formulation of rules and consequences, may discover that the joy is in the journey, and heaven is found along the way. Parents would do well to concentrate on a three-pronged approach to managing the journey. First, a positive relationship with their child is essential to success. When parent-child interactions are characterized by warmth, kindness, consistency, respect, and love, the relationship will flourish, as will self-esteem, mental health, spirituality, and social skills. Second, being genuinely interested in children's activities allows parents to monitor behavior, which is crucial in keeping teens out of trouble. When misbehavior does occur, parents who have involved their children in setting family rules and consequences can expect less flack from their children as they calmly enforce the rules. Parents who, together with their children, set firm boundaries and high expectations may find that their children's abilities to live up to those expectations grow. Third, parents who encourage independent thought and expression in their children may find that they are raising children who have a healthy sense of self and an enhanced ability to resist peer pressure. Parents who give their teenagers their love, time, boundaries, and encouragement to think for themselves may find that they actually enjoy their children's adventure through adolescence. As they watch their sons and daughters grow in independence, make decisions, and develop into young adults, they may find that the child they have reared is, like the breathtaking view of the newborn they held for the first time, even better than they could have imagined.
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Question: What are some ways of disciplining teens? Answer:
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Question: How Can You Help A Child Learn Self-Control? Answer: It is possible to help a child foster self - control. The following are but a few suggestions on how you can help your child learn to control his or her behaviour at various points in their development:
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Question: What are some Parenting Tips for Fathers? Answer: Ten Ways to be a Better Dad
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Question: What are some parenting Tips for Non-Married Fathers? Answer:
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Question: Can parenting be linked to delinquency in African American children? Answer: Delinquent Children of Delinquent Parents' Addressing this issue from a realistic perspective, children only become delinquent as a result of delinquent parenting. Studies show that preventing a child from becoming delinquent must begin with good parenting skills and by understanding what reasons children stray toward delinquency. Some of the most common reasons are below:
Why children harbour anger toward a parent can be the result of a recent divorce or break-up of the parents or even a new marriage, and they may feel mistreated or neglected by the parent as compared to others. These are legitimate reasons for a child to show anger toward a parent simply because many parents are not aware how to relate to their child in such situations. These are normally times for the parent to grow and learn and they often forget about the child's growth.
They become defensive because this is normally the mood in the house when one parent is defending him or herself against the other. Children take this mood and incorporate it into their character and it surfaces at school and around friends, which leads to hostile social relationships.
When adults act under their age range by participating in reckless lifestyles, such as having the "party" mentality, entertaining many friends in the home with alcohol and or doing drugs, the child will believe this life is a normal behaviour. They will adopt many of their parent's traits and grow to live the same lives. When parents do such things as steal cable, watch bootleg movies, purchase stolen goods, cheat on taxes or any other system of society, the child will take notice and believe that every one cheats, drinks, does drugs, and or parties.
More often than reported, children are left to fend for themselves. There have been reports from school authorities that children come to school with bad hygiene, malnourished because no one is home to cook or there is no food in the house, in addition to the physical abuse of children teachers notice. Even when children are left at home alone for three to 4 hours everyday because the parent is working they can become bitter overtime for feeling neglected and unloved. Children need to feel love from their parents or they will seek it elsewhere.
Despite what mainstream culture passes as modern day discipline for children, i.e., timeout discipline, child-parent contracts, and restricting and confiscating play-things, as opposed to a good ole' spanking and a two hour lecture afterward about what is acceptable and what is not. Not to imply that spanking cures all, but if it is practiced early on when children are very young like two and 3, there is a better chance that that child will heed all warnings afterward and well into their teen years. A parent may never have to spank their child again if the rules and hierarchy of authority is enforced from the beginning.
Many parents are guilty of this and do not realize that it truly affects the child. Children see more affection and attention being given to another and they experience jealousy, which leads to resentment. When any of the above issues go unresolved they become deep-seated disorders within a child. Low self esteem, depression, and disrespect become entrenched in the child and they display their anger in forms of rebellion. Not all acts of juvenile delinquency result in court and or jail time, but can resort to drug use, teen pregnancies, and runaway's, even suicide. Once the problems become deep-rooted, the child seeks to fill the voids left by parents. There are hundreds of immoral and illegal acts that children find to fill these voids and by the time they begin to practice them it is almost too late to re-establish the parent-child bond. When the bond is permanently broken the relationship becomes a power struggle between the parent and the child, which often leads to either violence or the parent disowning the child. There are many cases where parents have tossed their child into the world too early because they have failed to raise that child properly and it is too late to start again. There is no such thing as a child who is born a bad seed, but there is something called bad parenting.
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Question: What are some good parenting tips? Answer: Raising kids today is arguably harder than ever before, but there are some ways to help ease the stress and strain of raising your little ones and prevent behaviour problems through good parenting.
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