parenting
Is parental influence on
younger children effective in today’s societal context?
Being a parent or legal guardian often requires you to be constantly aware of your influence on a child, more so in their developmental stages, and often up to the pre-teen as well as teenage stage. A key question would then be, do parents need to adapt their parenting styles or perspectives in line with what is at play in today’s societal context given the fluid and complex nature of children? By Matseleng Mogodi
A
healthy environment where children and parents effectively communicate with each other, where values and expectations are shared, allows for far more meaningful relations. Furthermore, a Stanford University-led study recently conducted in California in the US, highlighted the importance of parents enabling their children to take the lead at times and where applicable parental leadership be applied when deemed necessary. According to an education professor at the university, Jelena Obradovic, an enormous amount of parental involvement can become a negative element – for instance, when a child is focused on an activity, it can undermine their behavioural development. It was also observed by researchers who conducted the study that parents’ behaviour when kindergarden-age children were actively engaged in an activity made it difficult at times for them to fully be present as this affected their focus.
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An intricate balance between children’s desires and parental expectations Nevertheless, there is a need for an intricate balance between children’s desires and parental expectations. What creates the biggest problems is that parents have expectations and children have their own minds. As parents, we may still be stuck in the old model of what we think works and thus in the process we impact the progress and potential of our children. Parents need to ensure they educate themselves more about what children of this current generation require from them as parents. Parents do not necessarily know more, but what they do have is more
infor mation accumulated over many years’ experiences. Parental influence on children often tends to create difficulties when it comes to regulating a child’s behaviour and emotions in certain moments. This also affects a child during tasks which measure delayed gratification, as well as other exclusive functions and skills associated with impulse control and the ability to switch between competing demands for attention. It is also often found that this phenomenon occurs across all socio-economic landscapes since human beings are complex across all fronts. www.babysandbeyond.co.za
