The home is a unit of a society. A child is born into it to be guided by his/her parents. As he/she grows into the contemporary society, he tends to socialize and interact with members of his community. Parenting is the outcome of what a society might turn out to be. As a child grows up in his natural environment, he gives back to the society what he is familiar with and such attitudinal trait will make a society grow or be at risk as regards development and growth process.
Parenting has been called the ultimate long-term investment. It’s one of the most complex and challenging jobs you will face in your life time and also the most rewarding. Parenting strong-willed children can even be more difficult and frustrating. Parents of strong-willed children are often frustrated by their children’s behaviour as well as lack of support and resources to help them deal with their children. In essence, parents are responsible for the supervision of a child’s mental, emotional, cultural, religious, social, psychological and physical behaviours, so as to reduce if not eliminate moral decadence that might occur in the nearest future.
Current findings on parental influences provide more sophisticated and less deterministic explanations than earlier theory and research on parenting. Contemporary research approaches include;
a)Behaviour-genetic designs, augmented with direct measures of potential environmental influences.
b)Studies distinguishing among children with different genetically influenced predispositions in terms of their responses to different environmental conditions.
c)Experimental and quasi-experimental studies of change in children’s behavior as a result of their exposure to parents’ behavior, after controlling for children’s initial characteristics and,
d)Research on interactions between parenting and non-familiar environmental influences and contexts, illustrating contemporary concern with influences beyond the parent-child dyad.
These approaches indicate that parental influences on child development are neither unambiguous as earlier researchers suggested nor as insubstantial as current critics claim. I quite agree with Collen Wilson and Candice Smith on their research and experience backed up by neuroscience that shows parenting is about the parents, not just the children. So while emotional intelligence and personal development are enjoying a global groundswell, I believe that achieving this starts with the adults. Parents must develop themselves first, to develop the positive change first, before impacting.
‘What we are, teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become’ Joseph Chilton-Pearce.
‘Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them’ James Baldwin.
Through a multidisciplinary perspective, this paper work describes contemporary parenting skills, parental roles and responsibilities and also profer solutions to identified problems that might occur during parenting.