As the trend is, we all want to see our children doing well in their lives. Our definition of “doing well” starts and ends with a great deal in career. We want our children to do well in their studies, get a wonderful score during their school and university and finally end up having a wonderful job or profession.
There isn’t anything wrong in it, for it needs money and a source of regular income to fulfill all one’s desires. But do we end up stressing our child in the process? Is our parenting making the child career driven but burdened? It’s time to sit back and think. It’s time to forget what is needed and think what can really be done to mend it.
We have seen parents who reward the child on his performance. They ask him to recite a poem in front of the guests and then reward him with a chocolate when he does it well. The child is promised for a vacation or a video game if he scores well or a little higher than his friends in his school. But why is it performance based?
In the process of performing well, the child creates a mindset that every time he would do well he would be rewarded. But do we humans do well or better than others every time? When the child doesn’t perform well, a new word is added to his dictionary, and that is “failure.” He hasn’t failed literally, but his reward was attached to performing well or may be better than others. When he doesn’t perform that way, he might end up feeling burdened.
Rewarding around performance also means a lack of acceptance from parents. They show signs of being happy or rewarding only when the child does better than others. There is criticism involved and the child is given examples of other classmates who did better than him. From here the child learns being self-critical and it gives birth to a feeling of guilt. Have you seen people unable to sleep at night, who when asked the reason, say they have not been performing well when their colleagues or friends are so well off. This self-criticism was ignited when the father first compared the child to a friend or a classmate who performed better.We have seen people getting depressed on doing something lesser than others. It’s their way to be self-critical which originated when the person, as a child, was scolded around his performance.These children are the ones who are meeting psychiatrists is their later lives and parents are clueless of what they did.
Empower and Accept your child and forget the society.
What is needed from parents is empowerment. Instead of rewarding the child around his performance, the child should be rewarded around participation or his hardwork. Even if he performs “not so well,” the acceptance and appreciation would empower him to perform better the next time. He would then work on putting in extra efforts to move a step higher. But this would happen only when he is appreciated, empowered and showed the way to his “higher self” with love and care.
A human being is a complete universe in himself. When a child is born, a new universe is born. You are the one who is to either make him beautiful or critical, happy or short-tempered, gregarious or a brooder.
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