I am no parent, I am just a guy who has had to do all the parenting on himself, and by parenting, I mean just the micro stuff. To give some more context, I am an adult, 24-year-old male to be precise. This article is not advice on parenting, this is about why people may have been too early in deciding to go for a child.
Children are extremely malleable. Their thought processes, attitudes, perspectives, opinions, and everything else of that sort is, but shaped by the environment their parents create around them. It must be a careful and well-thought decision to go for a child, and that’s not because this is a decision that comes with a lot of responsibility, everyone knows that there are blogs, etc that can better tell you all about all of that. As I like to call it all that’s just the macro part of parenting, people do figure out that part eventually. I am here to speak on the micro part, one that might put you as a family and our potential offspring on a self-destructive path.
As a child I have had a very rough childhood, having to parent myself throughout, I don’t say it as means of gaining sympathy but as means of establishing that I know what I am speaking about, my knowledge stems from personal experience. My father was not ready to handle the macro part and my mother was not ready for the micro part, my father escaped his responsibilities, for far longer than we should have we tried to manage and when it became utterly impossible my mother put her foot down and decided to fill in on the macro part. Some single parents understand the importance of both and try to manage both, their children are wonderful people, or if the children aren’t that’s down to factors which the parent couldn’t have paid attention to, again courtesy of being a single parent.
While making this decision of becoming parents, some people tend to forget that their role as a parent isn’t just limited to taking care of the new life they bring to this world, providing for it to nurture it, their job as parents doesn’t end there, they are also responsible to shape it, mold it into another amazing human being, and not a muddy mess of issues related to personality or the psyche of a person or any such issue that torment the person throughout their lives and possibly push them on a self-destructive path. That’s probably what happened in my father’s case, he recently died, all alone, if it wasn’t for a PG staying with him, his body might have decayed some before anyone found out about the unfortunate demise. My tone about my father is such because we have been estranged for a long time and I tried a lot of times to reconcile, but he never took the initiative to resolve the issues between us. This could happen with your children if you aren’t careful. This article is just a start.
There is no standard way to raising a child, each person is beautiful in their own way unless they are a mess inside. The only standard thing a parent can do is to teach their child to sort out what is inside at the earnest. Trying to do something for a child which he/she can do for himself/herself is again something that pushes parents and children further from each other. So Parents shouldn’t focus on micromanaging the micro aspects of parenting, instead they should just guide their children, allowing ample space for the child to grow in his/her own manner and pace. Parents should simply worry about building attributes like confidence, communication skills, etc in their children and leave other things to catch on at a pace comfortable to both the parents and the children.
That, however, doesn’t mean not being present in the lives of your own children, this was a mistake my mom was forced to make by our circumstances. Parents should pay attention to every aspect of the lives of their children, establish means of being informed about every aspect of their lives however oversight should be the preference and intervention should come only when necessary, even then a thought should be given to whether children can handle it themselves, you see children are capable of exceeding expectations in most unpredictable manners. Irrespective of what is done or what isn’t done the children should always be aware that their parents are there, to prevent them from falling, to help them up if they do fall, to guide them, to prevent them from doing anything wrong, to help them correct the wrongs if they still do.
Children need to learn to stand on their own feet, to walk at their own pace, to accelerate on their own pace to start running when they know they are ready to run, a child doesn’t just do this all physically but also metaphorically.
Becoming a parent is a decision that shouldn’t just take into consideration answers to the questions like:- How will I provide for my child financially? How will I take care of my family? How will I protect my family? But also questions like:- How will I raise my child? How will I teach him to walk his own path and at the same time guide him? How will I know when to maintain oversight and when to intervene? What will my reaction be if my child does something wrong? You are ready for parenting only when you are asking yourself both the type of questions while making the decisions. You may not have concrete answers, but what’s important that you are ready to figure out both the micro and the macro, not just a single aspect or worse run away from both.
My childhood, teenage, and adolescence weren’t something I can look back to feeling good because one of my parents ran away from both while one wasn’t able to manage both so chose to focus on just one. I hope as parents you along with your better half manage to figure out how to manage both.
I would love to hear about your experiences as parents or if there’s something on your mind that maybe a youngster’s perspective can help out with or even if you just want to maybe speak with a stranger. Well, in either case, you can write to me at elonpaul9@gmail.com
