What Parenting means to me

I few months ago I was involved in a wonderful email conversation which helped me to get down on paper some of my beliefs. Here is my response to what my core parenting beliefs are.

My parenting ideas are ever evolving but I shall do my best to give you a bit of a list of core ideas that have shaped our home.

1. Children are human beings.
2. Families are a gift from God that should be treasured.
3. Parenting needs to come from a place of love, respect, compassion and trust for the individuals in the family.
4. Parents are a parenting team. Their unity and strong foundation is the foundation for the parenting as well as the home environment.
5. Children want to be competent members of the family and the greater culture.
6. Instruction, boundaries and discipline/ correction are only effective in a connected relationship where there is love, trust and respect.
7. Individuals need to understand boundaries in order to have healthy relationships.
8. To grow we need safe, consistent boundaries in which to explore and develop our selves.
9. Children need to feel safe and loved. They will find it and the job of the parent is to provide in in the home.
10. From birth the child needs lots of loving and appropriate touch in order to develop into a whole confident person.
11. It’s important to remember you are raising a child to be an adult.
12. Parents need to support the development of strong self confident autonomous people.
13. Strong healthy families yield strong healthy people.
14. People express themselves not only with words but with behavior. We need to watch and listen to the behavior as well as the words of our children.
15. Parents model far more than we ever think we do.

To me being a successful parent or having a “good home” or “ good child” is far more than having order and obedient children. You can train anything to obey or keep a space clean with the right tools. It’s having a home were we all respectfully have our own personalities and work together in order to care for the family. It’s less about chores to keep the home clean and more about work to maintain the space we share. These I think seam like semantic sudle differences but I see them key to being a person with confidence and the ability to make good choices regardless of the pressures faced. I try to always look at my long term goal rather than what I want right then.