Parenting is a chosen life long responsibility in which there is no retirement. Professor Matthew Sanders, from the University of Queensland, mentioned in an introductory seminar on Positive Parenting Program that it is easy to be a chairman/director of an international company than a parent.
Many definitions are available for parenting. For some parenting is to facilitate a child’s optimal development within a safe environment [Reder, P., Duncan, S. & Lucey, C. Studies in the Assessment of Parenting. London: Routledge. 2003] and for others parenting is teaching your child the difference between right and wrong, how to survive in the world and giving your child undivided love and support. For some parenting tasks includes sensitivity to a child’s needs, social communication, emotional expressiveness and disciplinary control [Rutter, M. Resilience in the face of adversity. British Journal of Psychiatry. 147: 598-611. 1985] and for others parenting is adaptability to the changing requirements and circumstances of the child. [Azar, S.T. & Cote, L.R. Sociocultural issues in the evaluation of the needs of children in custody decisionmaking: What do our current frameworks for evaluating parenting practices have to offer? International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. 25: 193-217. 2002].
Parenting required quality time, patient, perceptiveness, active involvement, responsiveness, flexibility and many more characteristics. Parents are responsible to provide a healthy environment in which children grow happily, freely and become a better citizen. Parents’ roles change according to growth of their kids. But a thorough training is needed to deal with very dynamic, demanding, diversified and nondeterministic parenting roles as parenting is more complicated than a profession.
As far as parenting is concern, we still rely on ancient system of education that is learning by seeing or asking but without a systematic education. Most of the parents learn parenting by seeing what other parents are doing and recalling what their parents were doing or they do parenting intuitively. When parents encounter serious problems with their children, they ask other parents (in their opinion good parents) what to do; read books/articles or seek help from an expert. However, formal education on positive parenting for all will produce good to best parents and better generations by them.
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