Parenting is often over looked as a phase every person have to go through once in their lives. Parenting mistakes that comes with little understanding cost you so much in later life. However, the reality is that parenting is one of the toughest jobs on the planet.
It’s no more a just a theory. Parenting stress is real and science has proved it to be one of the worst stresses you’ll ever face in your life.
But what exactly makes parenting hard? There are various factors which contribute to making it hard. Let’s take a look at what those factors are exactly;
What makes parenting so hard today?
Let’s look and analyze each factor that makes the modern day parenting harder than what it was a few years ago.
1. The idea of ‘doing it all’
One psychological pressure that parenting put on the parents is the idea of being a 100% responsible towards their child’s needs while equally taking care of the other parts of their life. It does make sense from a broad perspective; however the expectation soon starts to shift towards a collective output.
This means being the best performer on their jobs, living the best time with their spouses and being an incredible parent, all at once. You’d literally be required to do everything from choosing the best dollhouses for toddlers to teaching them life values and between all this forms the continuous hectic life of parents.
It leads to many parents being miserable in each segment of their lives leading to mismanagement, negligence, and malpractices.
2. The loneliness that comes with it
One truth about parenting is that it feels very lonely. Even if you have your spouse for your support, you’ll still encounter times where you’ll feel isolated with a responsibility you’d have to bear.
This happens to mothers in most of the cases, since usually they spend the most time with kids in their growing ages.
Especially according to a research quoted by Metro, more than half of the parents with young kids feel isolated and lonely.
This sense of loneliness comes from the fact that young children have no emotions to express (at least in their toddler years) and this makes the parent suffocated on their own emotional needs.
3. It’s just a lot of responsibility
Parenting stress is usually noted in newly made parents. The primary cause behind this is the suddenly put burden of responsibility. After all, a quick transition from being a careless guy/girl in their twenties to being mature enough to take care of a baby isn’t easy.
This responsibility mostly goes heavy on many parents leading them to question their abilities and losing confidence in them. This ultimately results to poor parenting solutions and carrying a lot of mental baggage of stress.
Parenting Mistakes Every Parent Should Avoid Making
We’ve looked at what exactly makes parenting tough nowadays.
Now let’s move towards some mistakes which if parents avoid making, can make parenting much simple and easier for them.
Here are some of the most commonly made parenting mistakes which need to be avoided by parents at any cost for effective parenting and ideal upbringing.
1. Restraining your child from experiments
Parents are very conscious of their children and try their best to keep them as comfortable as possible even if it comes at the cost of their own ease. Sooner this consciousness turns into overprotectiveness.
This overprotectiveness leads you to not allowing your children to make their own decisions for themselves or take experimental actions in various scenarios. However at the same time you’re refraining your child from carrying out something different and ultimately unleash their strengths and uniqueness.
What you as Parents are taking away by doing this is confidence that your children would have in choices made by themselves, for the rest of their lives.
2. Constantly comparing them with other kids
Every kid is unique in themselves. Each one has their own strengths and weaknesses which are developed based on their DNA, upbringing and interests. It might be the case that your child isn’t so good at football, but is a master of chess.
When you compare your child to other children, especially when it’s done in a repetitive manner, you’re not respecting their unique qualities they might be possessing. This doesn’t mean competition shouldn’t be promoted in any field.
What this means is that you shouldn’t be extremely worried about your kid’s performance in everything. There will always be fields where your child will perform well and worse.
3. Solving every problem for your children
Of course every parent want their children to live a totally problem free life. Especially if the parents themselves had a tough life in respect to their financial, emotional or mental needs, they would do their best to not let it happen to their kids.
This makes total sense and there’s nothing wrong in this either. However, the actual problem starts when parents try to solve each and every problem for their kids, with them never facing any at all. This leads to children not being able to take control in problematic situations even when they’ve fully grown into adults.
For example, if you never let your kid go to the nearby store to buy anything, in future he’ll be missing out on tons of basic negotiation skills every adult needs to know.
4. Not presenting yourself as an example
There are various ways children start learning from an early age. A few of those are; learning by observing, learning by instructions, learning by experimenting. Think of it, how do you convey to your child that smoking isn’t good for health?
Well there are various ways of doing it; by telling them it’s bad or by never smoking in front of them. If you choose the former, your child might not smoke for some time till teenage however if you choose never to smoke (at least in front of them) your child might never smoke in their entire lifetime.
The reason here is that you’ve presented yourself as an example here. Your words about something totally mapped your personal actions. In any case, if your actions aren’t aligned with what you preach, your children will soon lose its value in their minds.
5. Having unrealistic expectations from your child
As parents you have many expectations from your children. You expect them to perform well in school, be serious about their careers, be following good etiquettes and have a kind heart. So does hundreds of other parents.
These qualities are exactly what every kid should strive for. However the problem arises when you raise the bar of your expectations so high hitting it becomes almost impossible for your child.
For example, let’s say you want your children to learn that lying is bad and they should never lie to anyone. That’s exactly what any parent would want ideally. However, if you’ve started scolding your children harshly just because you’ve caught them lying to you once or twice, it won’t make them learn anything since you’re involving fear as a driving force not integrity.
Reality is that you won’t be able to take away the basic human trait of “errors” from your children easily. So even if you’ve instructed them a hundred times, they’ll still make mistakes and it’s just the reality.
6. Going on extremes of parenting
There are various parenting styles. Some are popular and used by most of the parents, some aren’t very common. However each parent style is being practiced in the world and each have different impact on the kids. Two of the well-known parenting styles we know of are;
- Uninvolved parenting
- Permissive parenting
In short, uninvolved parenting refers to parents being neglectful towards children. It includes parents being un-attached to children, busy in their own life, concentrating the least on the child’s needs. This is one of the notable Parenting Mistakes in our list.
On the other hand there is permissive parenting which refers to parents offering more than what they should when it comes to fulfilling needs and wants of the child. It includes parents letting their child being the boss of the house, not refusing their child for anything he/she asks and most importantly letting them have a control over you.
What most of the parents have been seen following, are the extreme ends of both type of parenting. Either parents won’t be caring about their children at all or they’ll be taking steps they shouldn’t just to fulfill each and every demand their child have put forward.
This extremism in the attachment or negligence of parents often leads to children developing an emotional gap between them and their parents which becomes almost impossible to eliminate as they grow up.
Conclusion
Just as there are a lot of parenting mistakes being made and normalized every day, another idea that is highly being normalized nowadays is being a perfect parent.
Let it be society, your own friends/fellows/colleagues, or your own ego, you shouldn’t allow anything to propagate this concept in your mind.
The reality is that as parents you’ll be making a tremendous amount of mistakes and creating blunders, just like everyone does. What’s important is that you wake up every day with an aim of being a better father/mother than yesterday.
This is exactly what is in the best interest of your child’s upbringing.
