Child Rearing Is To Know Yourself As The Parent, To Know Your Children For Whom They Are, And Then To Help Your Children Prepare For The Future With Love And Patience And Consistency Of Purpose

Child Rearing and parenting our children is the same thing. This is a dual-purpose page that refers to conventional parenting and foster parenting, and lessons we can learn from both.

The art of raising children, or Child Rearing, is just that; an art and not a science.

Though many will try to give you rules and maxims that they claim must be followed in order to raise children properly, we as the parents must be the ultimate judges as to what will best serve the children we raise, and not be too anxious to follow ‘the experts’ down every path they wish to lead us in.

Benjamin McLane Spock was an American pediatrician and author who advocated that parents be flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as the young individuals whom they are.

He advocated these parenting principles in a day and age where it was commonly thought that parents needed to be harsh and austere with their young children, even to the point of not picking their children up and comforting them when they cried.

Dr. Spock was an advocate for parents trusting in themselves and in their parental instincts, even though this flew in the face of the then commonly held beliefs to the contrary.

And do you know what? He was absolutely right.

And what does this have to do with your ability and skills at Child Rearing?

It means that you too can trust yourself with what your feelings tell you about how to raise your child and deliver the proper balance of support, accountability, discipline, and love needed for the various children you are blessed with Child Rearing.

Of course we are wise to read what others have to say about Parenting Skills and other such related matters, for the more we know about various parental points-of-view, the better equipped we are to understand how those opinions support or contradict our own views on the subject, and thus we can have more confidence in the way we chose to live our lives and raise our children.

It is this search for various and useful opinions surrounding Child Rearing and the parenting experience at large that motivates this author and this website to feature Various Parenting Forums featuring true-life parenting stories, and your opportunity to comment on the same, to offering a Parental Q & A where parents can ask and answer each other’s parenting questions, to our latest Guest Author Series where Guest Authors share some of their parenting wisdom with this website, and where you can listen to parenting interviews and consider even more parenting wisdom than what is found within our written pages.

Never stop looking for the parental insights that can help you to be the best parent you can be and you are bound to be the best parent your child could ever have hoped for, both now and when your children think back on their early childhood and adolescent life many years from now.

This website will also be featuring parenting eBooks and helpful online parenting courses, none of which are designed to tell you the hidden secrets behind Child Rearing (for no such secrets exist, though many have promised the answers to such secrets in an attempt to make some money or sell a book or two), but all of which will help lead your mind through the process of thinking about WHY you do what you do as a parent, and to help you know if that is the right thing for you and your child, or if there might be a better way of doing things that you haven’t considered yet.

Parenting requires that you actually think for yourself and for your family, and that you think often.

It is when we as parents stop thinking and stop asking ourselves if we are being the best parents we can be, that we as parents get complacent and our children’s growth, security, and progress begins to suffer because of it.

Child rearing, especially for foster parents, is to triage what is wrong with a child you are parenting and to address the most sever needs first (since you don’t always know how long you will have each child in your care or custody) while instilling in each child a sense of worth and possibility for the future.

Foster Parents are the M.A.S.H. units of the parenting world, and care should be given to the most glaring of childhood emotional and psychological wounds first. This often takes time to determine what exactly is needed to help as each foster child’s needs surfaces slowly, often in bits and pieces, like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle of wounded hearts and emotions.

That is what makes Foster Parenting such a vital service of love and support to those who need that love and support the most.

This same Child Rearing nurture, repair, and support also applies to non foster parents and should be easier to a degree since parents who parent their own children have much more time to know and understand their children on a much deeper and more permanent level.

Are you as a parent taking the time to REALLY know and understand who your children are, and what their specific needs are right now?

TIME spent with your children is a Child Rearing essential for which there is no suitable substitute.

No worldly success or honors or positions can compensate for a parent’s failure to Be A Parent, A Quality Parent, to the children we love and owe this most sacred of duties to.

I Wish I Were a Kid Again - © Michelle Brea

Do you have older children who are acting young, or do you have younger children who are acting old?

There is a charm and joy to each scenario, but you must know who your children really are in order to be the best parents you can be for them, and to help them in the ways they need your help.

Proper and effective Child Rearing requires you to find out WHO your children are NOW so that you have an accurate starting point of reference from whence to direct your parenting efforts.

Does your child have a need that has yet to be addressed?

Only by knowing who your child is can you know how best to start to address that need, and that all takes parental time, effort, and love.

But in all this you must trust yourself, for we all have a built-in parental compass, and life-compass for that matter, that whispers to us when we are doing well, and when we are not.

So trust yourself and that little voice inside you trying to direct your parental actions towards the correct paths.

The ‘parenting experts’ will tell you one thing today, and a different thing tomorrow, and then change their viewpoints the following month if it will boost sales or get them onto the next daytime talk show.

But YOUR parenting life and YOUR children do not change their basic natures with the opinions of the ‘experts’; this is your family and your children and this is seriously REAL.

Trust yourself, know yourself, know your children, treat your children the way you would want to be treated, and know that Child Behavior, like Child Rearing, is mostly taught by the examples you give to your children as you live with your children, and by how you treat your children every day.

All parents, but especially Foster Parents, must be mindful that Child Rearing is predominantly and foremost to do no harm.

This is because Foster Parents are given the opportunity to be the good examples of loving and patient parents to children who deserve as much in their lives and yet have frequently been denied this most basic of parenting essentials.

That is where this little voice inside you comes in. If you make a mistake, IT will tell you. Listen to that parental instinct that guides you to do what is right and then follow what it tells you to do.

Child Rearing is to treat your children with the same dignity and respect you want to be treated with yourself. It is the Golden Rule in parental action.

It is also to have the parental wisdom to Set Limits and to establish Family Rules And Expectations in order to help children know their boundaries, and to learn to live in a safe world of order and limits.

Child Rearing is to always remember who the parent is and to act accordingly.

This is an example of where reading parenting advice from others most certainly will come in handy. To wit; you read that setting limits for your children is a wise thing to do, but HOW you set these limits is a decision only YOU can properly make for you and your own children.

No expert knows your family and children better than you do.

We most certainly can and should learn many things from others, but the application of that knowledge is ours alone to decide upon and carry out.

Let me leave you with a story that gives all parents a glimpse as to the importance of Child Rearing, and how the quality and care we take with our parenting duties truly affects our happiness now, and in the future.

Once there was a man, a father of a family, who lived at home with his wife and children. This man had a father who because of age and circumstances found it necessary to live under his son’s roof during his old age.

This man’s son loved his Grandfather, and was very happy to have him living in their home. As the Grandfather got older, this man began to resent the time and sacrifice it took to care for his aged father within his own home.

One day the Grandfather accidently spilled his soup onto his blanket and broke his soup bowl upon the ground. The man replaced his aged father’s soup bowl with a crude wooden bowl and a rough wooden spoon. The man replaced the soiled blanket with a worn and tattered blanket.

The aged man felt the shame of these actions but never spoke an ill word against his son, whom he loved and appreciated with all of his heart. At last, as is the way of all the earth, this man’s aged father died.

After the man buried his father, he told his own teenaged son to throw away the wooden bowl, spoon, and tattered blanket. Instead, the teenage son carefully put these items in a box and stored them for safe keeping.

When the father asked his son why he was keeping those items, the son replied: “These are for you father, in case you need to one day live with me in YOUR old age”.

Child Rearing is an act of love and devotion that affects all parents, just as surely as it affects the children whom they parent.

Good and caring people become Foster Parents to help children and to strengthen families. Quality Child Rearing in our own homes prevents the need for others to care for and love OUR children in the ways we should be caring for and loving them all along.

It’s nice to know that the Foster Care System exists for those children and families who need it. It is even nicer to know that through your loving parenting and Child Rearing efforts, YOUR children will NEVER need this Foster Care System.

Child Rearing and Parenting: It really is that important!

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