Parenting

    Having the opportunity to have children is wonderful. It can bring so much joy into you and your partner's life. Even though it can be a great beautiful thing, parenting is hard! It takes a lot of work, practice, and trial and error. Michael Popkin helps breakdown parenting and different aspects and ideas to help people become better parents. Popkin breaks down the purpose for parenting into four ideas. These are to help prepare the child to survive in the world they live in. These are to protect, prepare, survive, and thrive. You are preparing your child to grow up and be prepared for the world and experiences that they are going to face. You can prepare them for the next day, the coming year, and all the way into adulthood. Popkin's gives us a list of ballast qualities that you can help your children to develop to prepare them for the future. Ballast is a heavy metal used to improve stability. These qualities will do the same, provide stability for the children and consequently prepare them for the future. The first is Courage, which is as Popkin describes, "confidence to take a known risk for a known purpose." It takes courage for things like getting outside your comfort zone and learning more. Next is self-esteem. This is having confidence in yourself. Believe that you can do something. The next ballast quality is responsibility. Popkin describes this as, "the ability to make decisions and accept the outcome of those decisions." Your child will face so many decisions in their life, big or small. Taking responsibility is so important and can help young kids learn and grow better than denying or avoiding a situation. The skills they develop at a young age will go with them all throughout their future. Cooperation is the next ballast quality. Learning how to work together with other people well. Have you ever been in a group project or lived with roommates and they never did their work or would only think about themselves to a point where it was a big problem. This is where cooperation is needed. Encouraging learning cooperation at a young age will help them to work with other people in their future. And working with others is unavoidable! The last quality is respect. Respect is something that everyone should develop and something that you hope others around you have developed. Popkin describes respect as "treating others as worthwhile, valuable human beings." Teaching your kids respect will stick with them and. help them all throughout their future with their relationships with other people especially. 

    Now you know what qualities to teach your children to help protect, prepare, survive, and thrive so that they will be better ready for the world to come. So how do you do this? How can you teach them these crucial qualities? Popking gives us an answer for this also. First, is to preside and plan. You are the parent and while they are young you need to help plan and preside for your children. Demonstrating this responsibility of presiding will help them develop responsibility and cooperation. Next, is to provide and pay for. Just as you are teaching responsibility, these kids are your responsibility. Demonstrate this through providing for them. This can help them learn and develop respect for you. Additionally to help them develop respect is to demonstrate respect. Protecting your children is another important thing to do as a parent. While protecting them you can let them learn and grow through mistakes but in safe situations. Keeping them safe while they are still making mistakes and learning through them can help build their courage and self-esteem. Lastly, nurture your children. Show love and let them know they are loved. Give them lots of hugs and develop a strong connection. This will make parenting better as a whole and benefit your child greatly.

    In conclusion one of the most important things you could take away from this is, leading by example is so important! All the qualities and skills we talked about you should demonstrate as well. Your children are always watching and learning from your actions even if you can't tell.