Week 11

 Dear Friends,

This week I was learning about the importance of parenting. What is the purpose of parenting? It is an opportunity received to raise the children of God. This process includes teaching and learning patience, balancing, and teaching the righteous things of life to survive in the world.

There were some people who always complains that raising kids is a big challenge. It is really a challenge to some, and it is a joy to some other parents. It all depends on the financial situations, challenges, and lifestyles. To find support to receive training on how to raise the children one get it from the training modules like STEP, PETS, ACTIVE PARENTING, etc.,

Raising children involves many different stages in life. They might be Infant when born, Infants when started moving their bodies, infants when started walking, kids when started to run, talk, express, discover, invent, and all other wonderful things children do before and after this is considered to be a different stage and important part of a kid life and even the parents' life. In all these stages mostly, we see the kids seeking physical contact to meet. The need for contact makes the kids do some crazy things to meet their needs. I remember when I first my nephew in the second month of his birth, he started to recognize people and he opened his eyes and moved his body a bit and gave an indication that he wants me to hold him in my arms. Since I was poor at understanding the kid started to cry, immediately once I hold him in my arms he started to smile. Wow!! That was an amazing experience for me.

As the children grow the parents have a great responsibility to watch over them, teach, correct and encourage them when needed. One of the very important things to teach them is to contribute. If we teach our kids how to work starting in the house will make a great change as they grew in their life. Even the contribution of work is very less, that will teach them great principle in their life.

The next thing after the contribution is choices. The choices we make in life lead to great turnings in life. Some choices will lead to challenges, and some will lead to sweet surprises. Anyhow each choice we make leads to something. All choices will not be the same. Some need to be considered age-appropriate, situation-appropriate and timely. For example, for a 5th-grade child, if we tell about the GMAT, CIVILS exam, and other huge terms of a test, they might get confused or get scared and lose the main focus on the education.

Protection is the other thing that every kid needs to be taught. When I was in 6^th grade my uncle to me that in the rainy season when you walk on the footpath of the road always focus on the footpath and the road if there is any water on it. If there is water on the road or the footpath, there might be some pits or potholes on the holes, they are harmful, and danger doesn’t go near to them. Protection from the danger means not just learning self-defence, but also staying away from any unwanted quarrels, revenge, fights that gives huge disturbances in life.

Some ways to get rid of the unprotected things are:

1.     If situations are harmful, better to withdraw

2.     Control your anger by going away for a minute and coming back later.

3.     Don’t give an option for things to become a lie.

One of the other things that we see in kids mostly is the challenge. Most of the kids like challenges. They love to master them. We need to encourage kids to learn and master the challenges when they are very small. The more they are stronger mentally and physically the much brighter they see themselves in their life to master handling problems by themselves. Even though we want to encourage them to solve their problems by themselves we need always watch over them and do our best to jump immediately when the children need our support and encouragement.

These are some of the things I thought to share with you from my class.

Thank you for reading.

-Srikanth