Parenting Mistakes Every Parent Should Avoid Making at any Cost

Parenting isn’t as easy as it looks. One learns about it once they’ve become a parent by themselves. Other than just the financial responsibilities, there is a lot of mental stress that a parent deals with while he tries to do his job the best.

Let it be getting some princes toys for toddlers or admitting your first child into the school, balancing work with your family life or making personal sacrifices for family’s prosperity, parents do a lot. There’s no doubt in that!

Still somewhere in the process, parents make some serious mistakes that lead to long term damage either in the child or in your relationship with the child. For example, a lot of children complain that my mother is negative and depressing. In the same way fathers also have to face objections from their children.

Let’s have a look at some of the worst mistakes parents make which should be avoided at all costs.

• Making Parenting a Competition

Being a parent is less about you and more about the child. However, a lot of parents have set the tasks and split the responsibilities to one-up their partner. This is exactly where things start to go wrong.

There’s nothing wrong than trying to be a better parent than your partner. The problem starts when you think of parenting in a self-centric manner and forget about the actual priority somewhere in the competition; your child itself.

The output of this practice is that your child never connects with you on a personal level since he’s stuck between you and your partner’s so called parenting rules. The same rules which you mold to make each other look small and gain the attention of your child.

• Not Being a 100% Involved

Parenting is all about responsibility and attention towards your child. Especially in the growing age, a child needs 100% of the parent’s attention. Of course it means you’ll go to work and carry other important things of life.

However, at the same time, when you’re home and around your child you can’t just sit aside scrolling through your phone. This is the age where you develop your child’s character, their personality, their thoughts and traits. Children who were handled with ignorant parenting earlier in their life might feel low self-esteem growing up.

There are some parents who try to multi-task between work and family. Again if you’re sending emails while claiming to listen to your child’s day at school, you’re not being 100% involved around your child and that can be problematic in a few years as the grow up.

• Solving Every Problem for their Children

As humans we learn about different aspects and challenges of life by living through them. We learn to “live” and face life the same way we learned cycling as a child. Even if we were told a 100 times how to balance the bicycle and how to pedal we still wouldn’t have been able to learn it if we didn’t try it by ourselves.

Many parents, out of love and care, try to solve each of the problems for their child. Although the parent thinks they’ve protected their child from struggle and hassle their action has done more harm than good.

The time parents solve a problem for their child, they take away the confidence and learning that was going to help their child face the same problems again in life. What you as parents should do is encourage them to believe that no problem is unsolvable and they just have to figure it out.

• Projecting your aims on to your child

We all have had dreams to accomplish in our lives. Some of them accomplished their dreams enthusiastically, some tried their best but took pride in failure and some never took the first step. This often leads to regret along with an ambition to project your dream on your child.

Having a strong emotional connection many parents make the mistake of imposing their goals and way of life on their children. This scheme fails miserably.

Let it be anything; career aspirations, sports goals, extra-curricular activities or simply social interactions, parents should teach their children all about conquering those fields but let them handle it all their own way.

Otherwise a child never truly discovers their own natural abilities and never develops a personality of their own.

• Finding your child’s disrespect cute

One of the most common mistakes many soft hearted parents make is that they lean towards permissive parenting while trying their best not be an uninvolved parent. One example of this practice is when parents start finding disrespectful behavior of their child, cute.

We all have seen parents laughing and enjoying while their child acts disrespectfully and show no manners even if they’re sitting in a gathering. This way you’re doing nothing more than enforcing the child to do more of it.

Parents should be certain on the boundaries they create between them and their child. For example, if you and your child is having fun singing songs loudly, that’s all good. However at the same time you should convey the fact that they can’t sing wildly or shout anytime they want and wherever they want.

With this one small act you’re giving the child freedom while at the same time you’re setting up a reasonable boundary as well.

Conclusion

There’s absolutely nothing like being a perfect parent. Every parent tries their best and in the process they make mistakes as well.

What’s important is that you keep a balanced approach.

A balanced approach would the one where you’re not being too harsh neither are you too soft towards your child.