“Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.” – Jonathan Anthony Burnett
It’s a query that runs via each parent’s mind, at least one day: Am I a terrible parent? The disheartened actuality is that a minority of parents comparatively desire to enrich their parenting styles. Bad parenting can be defined as inadequate parental support for their children in terms of emotions, psychological, intellectual, or physical. Predictably, many parents are not aware of their behaviours or they are extremely occupied to gain an understanding of active parents. Some parents are not prepared for the worst-case scenario while one segment is not caring enough about it. These attributes and actions are all grouped to indicate poor parenting skills.
There are numerous actions and incidences that would contribute to bad parenting skills. Here are a handful of signs that develops bad parenting skills:
• Denouncing the child even though he is holding nothing back. Despite the fact that the child has committed a mistake, many parents have the tenancy to obliviate that the child is heroic enough to reveal the truth.
• Majority of parents have a tendency to reprimand and discipline their children in the presence of each and every one. This might influence the child’s confidence, not to forget that the child will be ashamed in front of the community.
• The ultimate nightmare of a child is to be compared with a different child. Parents appreciate the hard work, attitudes, and personality of another child and force their own to emulate the so-called ‘perfect’ child instead of appreciating their abilities and capabilities.
• In the 21st century, it is systemically unsurprising that both parents have a professional life. This leads to a reduction in the time devoted to the child. Children require the attention and time of their parents especially during stressful situations like examinations or even after a hard day at school.
• Parents who fail to set good examples can be said to have bad parenting skills. For example, there are children whose parents are engaged in criminal activities, are imprisoned, or are alcoholics.
Undeniably, certain parenting actions negatively influence a child’s development.
One of the main consequences of bad parenting refers to the inability of the child to adapt to society. This occurs when the child is not being disciplined especially when the child is not being penalized even though he misconstrued. In this particular situation, the child will perpetually assume that he is always right in spite of the fact that he isn’t. It will be problematic for them to maintain long-lasting relationships as individuals will rather be their enemies rather than be their friends.
Bad parenting leads to violence and crime. Universally, 7.3 million youngsters’ guardians are contemporarily in jail. Kids whose guardians are involved in criminal activities, precisely, encounter a plethora of obstacles and misfortunes like mental strain, social problems, suspension or removal from school, financial problems, and crime. It is hard to predict how a child will move forward in his life when a parent is irregularly or ceaselessly detained. Regrettably, 70% of these children are condemned to proceed with the equivalent footsteps of their parents and end up becoming detained sooner or later in their lives. As a matter of fact, children whose parents are imprisoned, are more probable than their friends to get involved in criminality. In any circumstances, these children are overlooked before they stumble into difficulty.
Not to mention that many children encounter difficulties in schools due to inattentive parents. The majority of parents devote most of their precious time to their professional life so as to satisfy the needs and wants of their families. Nothing is wrong with that but in most cases, work gradually substitutes the child. According to a study conducted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), states that parents’ involvement in education has a positive impact on the child’s academic performance. Then children whose parents are negligent, tend to perform badly at school. Additionally, there are parents who pressurize their children to get good results and these children end up studying not because they enjoyed it but with the sole aim to please their parents.
The above circumstances, in and of themselves, do not explain why any otherwise responsible, reasonably rational person is having trouble with parenting issues. The person is struggling because they have convinced themselves that their childhood is a handicap and/or believe in the Freudian myth of parenting determinism. If a person knows that his parents were a mess, then the person also knows how not to be a similar mess. “My parents were bad role models” is a form of self-enabling. The problem is the person’s persistent use of their childhood to avoid personal responsibility- the person describes their childhood as a handicap; therefore, it is a handicap. Put another way the positive, functional statement is “I know how to be a good parent precisely because my parents were such miserably bad parents.” The difference between being handicapped or not being handicapped is a choice, a difference of point of view only.
Sigmund Freud, the so-called “Father of Modern Psychology,” proposed that parenting produces the person-amounts to denial of free will. It also gives people permission to create soap operas out of their childhoods. Freud was, of course, just plain wrong. Examples abound of people being raised badly who turned out well, and vice versa. But the myth persists, which is why so many therapists make so much ado of their client’s childhoods. People believe their less-than-desirable childhoods explain why they are not the parents they want to be because they believe in parenting determinism, but the problem is their belief, not some inescapable cause-effect relationship.
To conclude, here are some helpful self-parenting tips that can help you overcome absent parenting from your childhood. Falling in love with boundaries, in its most basic form, means defining what is okay and what is not okay. Practice mindfulness to help you stay in the here and now, people often struggle with residual anger over MIA parenting, it’s about acceptance in the end-to bring awareness about your thinking states to get caught rehashing the past or fearing the future. A common tendency is to reject help from others- allow yourself to experience vulnerability, dependency, and other emotional states that are challenging for you. Humans are wired to connect and isolation and rebuffing others won’t help you recover emotionally; while self-reliance may have helped one get through childhood, being overly independent is not a healthy coping skill in adulthood. Learn to self-soothe-practice deep breathing, relaxation, positive visualization, and thought awareness to ease your anxious mind. Even if your parents did not teach you to do any of these, it does not mean that it is wrong.
Buroty Kalpana. Tooshar Dommun
Zen Mauritius 