Parenting

Wikipedia gives us definition of parenting as “the process of raising and educating a child from birth until childhood”. The term has lately appeared and is becoming more and more popular with time’s flow.

To my point of view, parenting is one of those things, which should be explained to people to simplify their life, вЂ?cause parenting is something more than just a totality of psychology, psychoanalysis, and ability to find common language with your descendant. Well learnt parenting skills, which are explained by parenting as a science, will never be a guarantee of good-natured children, вЂ?cause children’s nature is not a mathematic formula, but like a poetry. Therefore, the term “parenting skills” has nothing from science, but it represents one of the most sophisticated arts ever existed, because its not enough to teach children how to live, but it’s necessary teach them how to love living in the modern world, setting your own example. “My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it”, Clarence Budinton Kelland said, describing the principle of upbringing.

Experience

Surely, when I’m to describe parenting through experience I tend to turn my mind to my daughter. No experience or interaction will ever compare to your own unforgettable one. Once she was born I could never realize that such a small creature would ever bring any trouble on my head. Of course she did, but now recalling those times I understand how how foolish I was when considered it a real trouble, �cause nothing else will ever bring such a joy, than observation of her first steps, her first word, first day at school, and later her first date…

Subtopic 1

Usually, young parents of those times did not think much of such a thing like “parenting”, but it was always discussed such a thing like upbringing. You may think those are the same things, but I would say they were not. There wasn’t so much complexity in the simple upbringing in comparison to modern sophisticated “parenting”. The beginning of establishment of my parenting skill can be considered the day when some Freud’s book appeared in my hands.

Freud described the way he saw parent-child relationship. It really added me some fear for my loving daughter and feeling of absolutely irresponsible parent having no idea what children needed. He saw parents as saw parents as mainly responsible for a child’s developmental outcome. Maybe the source of fear was not the essence of the book, but the fact that for the first time in my life I read about upbringing in that Freud’s scientific language.

So I made the conclusion from that book, and from that time parenting literature always accompanied me up to the point, where I did not feet that much responsibility for my daughter’s life any more.

When my daughter was five I read and made notes from Erikson’s theory of psychological development. As I noted, it “placed more emphasis on the inner biological and additional societal factors influencing children’s growth and development than on the primacy of parental influences at all stages over the life span” (Parenting in Project, 2002). So, I adjusted the way of communicating with my daughter and payed more attention to the inner world of my child.

Subtopic 2

When I was on the stage of childbearing I barely thought about stages, into which the child life span is divided. That’s now that I know parenting issues in the each of those periods and can describe mine.

The stage of parenting and pregnancy was quite vague and extremely fast for me. Nevertheless, I could surely, say that the lifestyle of both of parents extremely influence not yet born child. Later, when having an infant on my arms, I understood how much care and tender that baby needed. When my daughter was in the preschooler stage, my main responsibility was to make decisions about education and to introduce the virgin soul to the “adult” world. In the stage of being adolescent it’s extremely important to cooperate with children, to know their problems, and discuss them, because on this very stage the child was going to be adult and her identity was forming. I understood it just intuitively. With time’s flow, on the stages of being young adult and adult, I took less and less responsibility, considering my child had become adult. On this stage parenting becomes extremely difficult and needs special approach.

Subtopic 3

The model, which I really liked was “Parenting for Everyone” model and successfully implemented it. The point is that the model was created in accordance with my inner world, the world of philosopher. The philosophy of Parenting For Everyone shows upbringing from the ethical angle. It analyses parenting objectives, state and means of childbearing. It offers to look at a child's inner world (heart, intelligence and spirit of a child) and obtain the sources of parenting success from there. The theory of heart implies the child's feeling of being loved and his capability to love others. The concept of intelligence explains the child's ability to distinguish good and bad, his moral intelligence. And the theory of spirit implies the child's will to do good actions and avoid bad behavior, avoid encroaching upon anybody's dignity. The core concept of the philosophy of Parenting For Everyone is the concept of dignity, the child's ability to feel worthiness and justice.

Subtopic 4

When I was thinking about “discipline-punishment” topic, surely I remember that “Reward and Punishment” model of parenting. It’s quite simple to understand that according to this model, the child get reward for his bad deeds, and vice versa. But as for me, such a model reminds me about training of a dog, where the whole upbringing is based on instincts of the dog, but not his intellectual capabilities. The only motivator in this case is the reward, but not desire to be better than you are, what is based on understanding of the world. That’s why I declined this model immediately.

Subtopic 5

It’s reasonable to derive three styles of parenting: “rules of traffic” style, “fine gardening” style, and “reward and punishment” style. We