When things seem to be spiraling out of control as far as parenting is concerned, a normal and rather instinctive reaction of any parent is to ponder upon what's missing. What can be added to the current situation to compel a child to improve his current situation?
For instance, if a child refuses to listen, the instant reaction of a parent would be to increase or raise their tone and voice rather than to lower it. Similarly, if a child is confronted with a difficult conundrum, parents instantly start showering a pile of ideas to help him out rather than keep quiet and just offer him a helping hand.
The reality of this situation is that a child is more likely to listen if his parents speak more softly and offer him fewer ideas without any dictations. According to UA News, this naturally motivates the child to seek out his own solutions.
Parenthood is mostly based on the assumption that when children are struggling with something, they lack something and need more of it. Most often than not, the case is quite opposite. Parents overdo things, obviously out of good intentions but nevertheless these efforts are often unwanted.
A post in Empowering Parents suggest that over-praising, over-giving and over-sharing are surely some of the ways to impair a child's learning. Despite positive intentions, the outcome of this kind of over-involvement yields opposite results.
As a result, a child starts thinking he can't manage his homework without loads of parental assistance or he doesn't feel good until pampered by his mother on a daily basis. Parents inadvertently close the gates of self-reliance for their child, making them more dependent by the day.
What's the cost of this over-indulgence? Children ultimately learn helplessness rather gaining resilience. All parents want their kids far away from pain but this is rather far from practicality.
Empathy is only helpful up to a point. And that point hits when the child is confronted with a certain quandary and knows that he has all the help he needs behind him, which in turn gives him motivation to solve his problems and learn self-reliance.
Parenting can be a difficult task since it requires decisiveness in where to act and where not to. Understanding that a child needs to be capable of getting on his own two feet in order to face certain pains of this world, can be difficult to accept given the immense love that parents have for their child.
