Parenting

     This week we talked about parenting. For starters when we think about parenting we usually think about it being Mom and Dad's job, but when we think about the definition and purposes of parenting we can find that anyone ranging from grandparents to community can parent a child. Parenting a child consists of  teaching a children, preparing them for society, helping form future generation, and to help increase the chance of success for children out in the real world. In addition to that, children need to develop respect for themselves and others, and need to know how to cooperate and work together with other people towards a common goal. Parenting is a prime way of teaching kids really important value that they should develop, keep, and use in their lives.

    So some parenting tips that I got from this class started with not rewarding you kids. Some might think that giving a kid an incentive to do what you want like "hey if you take out the trash I will give you some of my chocolate" or something like that. What that can teach a child is that they should expect a reward for doing simple tasks and we find that when we do that we take away incentives for them in the future. This brings to mind a study about the effects of incentives when doing something someone enjoys. This study had two groups of people, one where people were given money to solve a puzzle and another group where they were given a puzzle to do for fun. The second part of the study was taking away the reward for the first group and the effect of that is that they stopped doing the puzzles even though they use to enjoy it. What that shows is that rewards can actually negatively effect us, it causes us to only do things when there is something in it for us and that can cause some problems with respect towards others and working with others. So what you should be doing instead of giving kids incentives to do tasks is to do polite requests. Just saying "Hey can you take out the garbage please" would be better. Now this doesn't apply to everything, Some tasks do require some incentives and it isn't bad to do those. It's like doing extracurricular stuff like picking up loads of leafs (things you wouldn't normally do) for some money. For example my Mom paid me to pick up all the beans that fell from our trees in both the front and back yard, and if it weren't for the incentive I wouldn't have worked as hard as I did to pick up every single bean I saw, I even picked up he beans on my neighbors yard. Now I probably could have done that without the money but that story is just to prove that incentives aren't always bad in my opinion . Though when it comes to tasks that children should do already, like clean up their mess, doing their chores, cleaning their room, stuff like that should not be rewarded. It's things that kids wouldn't normally do that would take a long time (my bean picking chore took me 3 or 4 days) that could be done with some sort of incentive.

    Next tips use “I feel” statements and be firm with what you say, not aggressive but firm and use logic. when debating or reasoning with a kids you should reason with them when they are debating with you. I would say that you should never ever use the phrase "because I said so". It's an easy quick solution but it isn't the right one. So instead of saying that you should use logic, say "I need you to take out the garbage because it's full it's trash collecting day tomorrow morning" instead of "because I said so". Then in cases where the child messed up like they aren't doing well in classes or anything you should be firm and use "I feel statements. Don't go off on them and saying "you need to get your act together or else you're going to be held back, is that what you want to happen!?". That's not how you should handle those moments, you should be open with them and say something like " Hey kid, I heard you're not doing so well in school. You know I want you to do well in school, I want you to graduate next year and be with all your friends". Then make a plan with them to help them be more successful. something like that where you treat them with respect and be their friend is a really good way to parent successfully.