Parenting today, is a lot different than parenting in the older times.
Rules of bringing up children have seen a sea change in the past few
decades. As the society is going through constant evolution, these
changes in parenting are only obvious. It is important that a parent
understands the world a child is exposed to. The biggest challenges of
modern parenting styles is raising kids, who are independent in thought
and are empowered to take the right decisions for themselves. This
full-time job comes with a new set of roles and responsibilities, which
questions you at every juncture, making the challenges tougher and
tougher as the children get older.
Challenges of Modern Parenting
Perfect Imbalance
With rising costs and skyrocketing inflation, earning money is the
unavoidable truth of raising a family. Thus, with both the parents
working round the clock the child gets neglected. This is the most
common problem faced by parents today. To make up for this neglect,
parents end up buying expensive gifts. Buying goodies is a temporary
solution of the underlying problem of your own guilt. As both the child
and parent gets used to this, the pattern continues for the rest of
their lives. Sadly, the child never learns to earn anything, as most of
the things he wanted were only a tantrum away. A parent's guilt and a
child abusing the same, makes the perfect imbalance in modern parenting.
Moral Code
As the television and other modes of mass communication penetrated every
household, it brought along a huge need for change in traditional parenting styles.
Every parent tries to teach the child good values, so that they learn
the distinction between morality and immorality at a very young age.
However, when a child sees his favorite actor smoke, abuse and indulge
in every activity that is termed as immoral with great enthusiasm, it
does shake certain beliefs for both the child and the parent. Thus, the
influx of media in day-to-day lives and the power of audio visual medium
holds on a child's mind, makes the process of teaching them morals a
big struggle for parents.
Quality Vs. Time
Time has always been a scarce resource. Especially with both the parents
working, spending time with children gets very difficult. As both the
parties are used to being away from each other, they rarely realize the
importance of spending quality time with one another. Thus, in rare
moments when they have time together, it's spent in silence or behind
locked doors. Deteriorating quality of relationships due to lack of
time, is the new age problem faced by modern parents. Sadly, with new
age technologies such as cellphones, computers and Internet, chatting is
the only form of conversations that one can have. Converting these
virtual conversations into reality is another challenge faced by both,
children and parents.
Rat Race
The modern world pressurizes children to be their best at whatever they
are doing. If you aren't the best, you've lost out on life already. Take
a moment here, and ask yourself what happened when you lost a school
competition? Well, nothing really changed. In fact the failure taught
you a new perspective of life. Slowing down and allowing your child to
cope with extra curricular activities is the crucial part of normal
development of a child. A pressure cooker situation worsens the
situation at home between child and the parent. This may even make the
child drift away from you and confide in people outside the house.
Masked Feelings
As many parents, live a stressful lifestyle, dictated by work pressure,
spouse's death or divorce with the spouse, it gets difficult for them to
handle their own emotional baggage. Under such circumstances, the
child's emotional health gets neglected and is often ignored. As lack of
communication widens the gap between parent and the child, it worsens
relationships at home and makes a child build a secret world of friends
and foes. Knowing your child's feelings is one of the toughest challenge
of modern-day parenting.
As this generation is exposed to huge amounts of information, helping
them assimilate it can be lead to a unique struggle between the parent
and the child. Besides these, teaching kids value of money, or
relationships and being a single parent poses a few more challenges in
modern parenting styles. Parenting is a wonderful joy, if is dealt with
an open mind to learn a few things from your kids too!
Ping Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment