Every parent’s desire is to raise children who grow up to be healthy, loving, and confident adults. The right seeds need to be planted early enough in life, so as to avoid emotionally unbalanced adults. I believe, that these seven rules of raising healthy children will defininately result in well balanced adults.
Allow freedom of information.
For a family to be healthy, allow the freedom of information, allow your children to partake in age appropriate family discussions, please don’t hide facts and information from them. This leads to open sharing of ideas, and a strong bond between parents and children.
Show your children respect.
You children aren’t your possessions. Treat them like the young people that they are. Talk to them with respect and dignity, and value their inputs and suggestions. Communication is about listening, you don’t have to agree with what you say, but you definitely need to listen to them.
Publicly and privately appreciate their successes, when they fail, listen to them, suggest ways of recovering from failure.
Accept your children’s feelings.
Accept that your child is going to have feelings of anger, joy, and sadness, among other feelings. Allow them to freely express them. Parents who overly discipline their children and deny their children the right to express their feelings raise emotionally deficit adults. Habits learnt in childhood manifest in adulthood.
Respect your children’s boundaries.
Respecting your child’s thoughts, dreams, and feelings is a simple way to respect the parent child boundaries. Any abuse whether, physical, verbal or emotional attacks theese boundaries. Simple things like monitoring their emails, SMS, WhatsApp chats, reading their diary or spying on them via their friends is not respecting their boundaries.
Allow children age-appropriate decisions, responsibility, and independence.
Teaching your children to make age-appropriate decisions, responsibility and independence can be done by teaching fiscal responsibility and financial decision making to them by giving them appropriate pocket money, allowing them to spend their money as they deem fit. Also, Allow them to independently spend the money they receive as gifts. But, Draw lines, don’t overindulge financially. Hence, Children need support in learning how to problem-solve and make decisions. Parents usually err on one extreme or the other. Thus, Many children must take on adult responsibilities too young and never learn to receive or rely on anyone. Some children are controlled or pampered, become dependent and don’t learn to make their own choices, while others are given unlimited freedom without guidance.
Have reasonable, predictable, humane rules and punishments.
