How to Raise Successful Children
You undoubtedly had many ideas about raising your children long before they arrived. But behind these ideas was your unwavering dedication and determination to do a good job.
Most of us approach parenthood with a sense of gravity and determination. However, our well-laid plans often meet with unexpected challenges. What seemed straightforward is, in fact, a complex and ever-evolving journey filled with intense emotions and constant new challenges.
Despite their small size, children have the power to evoke a range of intense emotions in us. Joy, confidence, and delight often intertwine with worry, guilt, and doubt. Fatigue and frustration are also part of the package. New challenges constantly arise, ensuring the parenting journey is a rollercoaster of emotions. And there’s no turning back.
Despite the challenges, you continue to give your best. You invest heavily in caring, time, energy, and money. You spare no effort – providing proper food and clothes, attractive toys, the right medical care, and ensuring a good education, even if it means stretching your budget. Your good intentions and heartfelt efforts are undeniable. Yet, some of you may find your child not turning out as you had hoped. Your child may be underachieving, emotionally immature, rebellious, or withdrawn. Perhaps they are associating with friends who are not a positive influence. The question, “How can my child be having problems when I’ve done so much and tried so hard?” is a common concern among many well-intentioned parents.
Even if your children are not facing any issues, the increasing rates of juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, and dropouts can still raise your anxiety levels. It’s normal to have occasional doubts and uncertainties about your parenting. Sometimes, your once-clear convictions may seem to blur and fade.
Reality can make you lose confidence as a parent. But regardless, you hold on to the dream of what your child could become. How can you make your dream come true?
The crucial ingredient
If you are like most parents, your hopes for your children are based on more than their avoiding negative company, addiction, or criminal activity. You want life to be positive for them: inner confidence, a sense of purpose and hard work, meaningful, constructive relationships with others, success at school and work, and, most of all, happiness. What you want is clear. Your uncertainties are often wrapped around how to help them achieve these goals.
Today, enough evidence has accumulated to give you such a formula: if your child has high self-esteem, they have it made. Mounting research shows that the fully functioning child (or adult) differs from the person who stumbles through life, and this difference lies in their attitude towards themselves and their degree of self-esteem.
The difference lies in their attitude towards themselves and their degree of self-esteem.
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem is not just a buzzword. It is how a person feels about themselves, their overall judgement of themselves, and how much they like who they are.
Healthy self-esteem is not false pride or conceit. It is a quiet sense of self-respect, a feeling of self-worth. When you have it deep inside, you’re glad you’re you. Conceit is but whitewash to cover low self-esteem. With high self-esteem, you don’t waste time and energy impressing others—you already know you have value.
Your child’s judgment of themselves influences the kind of friends they choose, how they get along with others, the kind of partner they choose to marry, and how productive they will be. It affects their creativity, integrity, stability, and whether they will be leaders or followers. Their feelings of self-worth form the core of their personality and determine their use of their aptitudes and abilities. Their attitude towards themselves directly affects how they live all parts of their lives. Self-esteem is the most important thing that determines whether a child will succeed or fail as a person.
As a parent who cares, you must help your children have healthy and wholehearted belief in themselves.
Two basic needs
Strong self-respect is based on two primary convictions:
- “I am lovable” (I matter and have value because I exist.)
- “I am worthwhile” (I can handle myself and my environment competently. I know I have something to offer others.)
Though thoroughly unique, each child has the same psychological need to feel lovable and worthy. You and I have them, and they will be with us until the day we die. Meeting these needs is as essential for emotional well-being as oxygen is for physical survival. No matter how hard you try, the one person you cannot avoid is you.
You may say, “But I love my child and he is worthwhile.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean he feels loved. There is a big difference between being loved and feeling loved.
Many parents are sure they love their children, but sometimes, their children don’t feel it. This is because there’s a significant difference between being loved and feeling loved. A child’s perception of being loved or unloved profoundly impacts their development.
As with love, so it is with feeling worthwhile. You must know how to convey that your child is competent and has something to offer others. Then, it can become an integral part of their self-picture.
If the most crucial ingredient of mental health is high self-esteem, where does it come from? Several studies indicate that this characteristic is not related to family wealth, education, geographical living, social class, parents’ occupation, or always having a mother at home. Instead, it comes from the quality of the relationships between the child and those who play a significant role in their lives.
Every normal infant is born with the potential for psychological health. However, whether that potential flourishes depends on the psychological climate in which the infant lives.
Recent research suggests that your good intentions as a parent have a great chance of becoming reality if you live with your children, so they are quietly glad they are who they are. None of us can afford to be ignorant or casual about a youngster’s most crucial characteristic—their degree of self-respect.
Helping children build healthy self-esteem is the key to successful parenthood.
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