Parenting

This has been a week I have been looking forward to the entire semester. Parenting is something that is so important to me and it’s something I really want to be able to do well for my kids. I want my kids to know how much I love them and I want to raise them right. I don’t want to have them going to therapy in their 20’s and 30’s to try and fix all the different ways I screwed them up. In my own life there are things that I think my parents did really well but there are other things that I think they did really poorly. I feel like I really relate to my professor Brother Williams because he talks a lot about his childhood. There are some things he thinks his parents did really well and some things they could have done better. I really liked this one example Brother Williams shared in class. He talked about how he had just bought this new truck that was really cool and had an incredible engine. With this new freedom of being able to drive and go wherever he wanted his parents set some very clear expectations with him. Some of these expectations included driving the speed limit and being home by midnight. Well there was one night when he went off with two of his friends that were dating. Well all three of them went on a drive and parked somewhere. His two friends that were dating got out and walked away and were probably out making out somewhere. Well it's getting closer and closer to midnight and his friends still aren't back. This puts my professor in a really tough situation because he knows he has to be back by midnight but at the same time he can’t just leave his friends out there. Eventually his friends get back and he drops them off but he makes it home after midnight. He goes in and tries to explain the situation to his parents. They seem really understanding and make sure he wasn’t speeding then he goes off to bed. The next day he has a date with a girl and while he is getting ready his Dad comes down and asks him what he is doing. He tells his Dad that he has a date and his Dad looks at him and reminds him that he came home after midnight the previous night so he will not be going anywhere. This was a hard lesson for my professor to learn because it wasn’t really his fault that his friends left and didn’t come back to the truck. His Dad made him stick to the expectations they had previously made. I think this was a really great parenting moment. I am worried that if I had been the parent in that situation I would have let it slide and then this would have let my child think that I was okay with going back on my commitments. I also think in some cases this would have encouraged my child to let it be an excuse for coming home late even if that wasn’t what actually happened. I think you need to set those firm expectations with your children and not let them get away with it no matter what the excuse is (or with very few exceptions because I do understand that an emergency could have happened that didn’t allow them to get home on time). Parents are there to help guide your child in the right direction so they grow up with good morals and become someone who is a great human being. You are there to help grow their creativity and let them know that they can do and become anyone or anything that they set their mind to. Parenting is hard and no one is perfect at it all you can do it keep trying and doing what is best for your child.