Purpose in Parenting

 Hello Everyone!

This week I have had the opportunity to learn more about parenting. I do not have children and am not even married so you may take what I have to say with some caution. But I have enjoyed what I have learned and do think it could be beneficial to know for when I am parenting my future children. 

I learned this week about the concept of 5 needs that children and even us have. The first need that a child has is the need for contact and belonging. It is so important for a child to have safe and healthy physical contact as well as emotional contact in a family. We learned of a story of children that didn't have the opportunity to receive much physical contact in an orphanage many years ago due to short staffing and overpopulated facilities. This lead to the development of those children's brains. The influence that loving contact can have on a child is amazing and so essential. We learned that often when this specific need is not met in a family the child may tend to have an undue attention-seeking behavior. The focus of this behavior is that it is undue. Every child wants and even needs attention and belonging in their home, but this undue attention-seeking means that the child is being deprived of that basic need and is seeking it in unnecessary or even healthy ways. The solution for this mistaken approach of the child is for the parents to offer contact with the child freely. This contact should be specific to the child and help them to understand their belonging to the family. The second need that was described to me was the need for power. We defined power as the ability to influence our own environment. This need for power can be deprived of a child and we often will see compensation from the child through rebellion and or the child trying to control others. The parental response to this would be to allow the child to have choices and consequences for those choices. As we allow for a child to make some choices it will help them develop responsibility. The third need is protection. The child's mistaken approach when this need is not met is the child taking revenge. The parent's response should be to teach the child assertiveness and forgiveness. This assertiveness should not be interpreted as being aggressive or overbearing. Assertiveness should be taught in the way of a child being able to express their feelings and stand up for what they care for. The fourth need is withdrawal. This means that the child should understand the importance of giving breaks for certain tasks. Often times we take that withdrawal and add in something that isn't necessarily productive or healthy like social media or tv. These seem to be unproductive because the tendency is that people will spend hours on social media or watching tv and then the child or person doesn't return to the task they originally were working on. So a mistaken approach to this withdrawal need is that a child will practice undue avoidance. This means that they avoid the task in a less effective manner than taking a short break. The parental response to this undue avoidance behavior should be to teach the child how to take wise breaks. This will teach them how to take shorter breaks in a way that will allow the child to understand that they need to finish what they start. The final need that I learned about was the need for a challenge. Often you hear of parents that take away challenges from their children because they want them to have a better childhood than what they had. But at times taking away challenges from a child will lead them to have a behavior of undue risk-taking. The parental response to this behavior would be to encourage skill-building. This skill-building will meet that need for challenge and allow the child to problem solve and develop their personality and work ethic in a positive manner. 

All these needs are so important and while I haven't had kids, I can see the importance of fulfilling these needs in our children. When learning the behaviors that a child develops when these needs are not met is actually a behavior that I have seen in various kids that I have interacted with. Parenting seems to be so challenging so I think these parental responses would be beneficial to try to implement into parenting practice with our present and future children.