Parenting is one of the most exhausting yet exhilarating experiences of life. Allah blessed us with a wonderful daughter one and half years ago. The time I spent parenting my daughters is the time I learn most about myself and overall about human behavior. Parenting is not easy. We should not approach it with a “On-The-Job-Training” method. We should learn about it, we should prepare ourselves for it. We should make sure that we treat it as a most important priority. Here are 18 core principles I have developed about parenting in my 18 months of experience:
- Parenting is less about children and more about parents. Want to improve your parenting? Make yourself better instead of trying to learn the tricks and hacks to raise a happy child.
- We should treat parenting as an educational institute instead of just a simple role to perform. It is more than raising a remarkable child. It is about becoming a leader who performs his or her role to make this world a better place. Raising children should not be treated as unpaid work but it should be treated as an ultimate leadership position.
- Make sure you send your children to school for social growth instead of using school as a way to outsource the parenting.
- Your children have a unique individual identity. Do not fix your insecurities by asking them to succeed at any cost. Do not put the burdens of your dreams on their shoulders. Let them live their life not your dreams.
- Parenting is not a competitive sport where we have to win at any cost. This only makes us treat our children as a scorecard to measure our social standings. We need to run our own race in our own way.
- Our children don’t owe us anything. We owe everything to them.
- Children follow our actions not our talks. So if you want to instill positive habits in them, do not preach them. Just do it yourself and they will start doing it on their own.
- Our main job as parents is to observe the children, not to direct the children.
- To raise a remarkable kid, our priority must not be to give our children a comfortable lifestyle but to provide them enough opportunities to grow timely.
- As parents, if you want to get the power, you need to give the power to them.
- Let them see you working. Let them see you working on your dreams. Let them see how passionate you are about your life.
- Carve out personal time blocks where you should focus on your wellbeing. Ultimately it’s your wellbeing that will get transferred to your children.
- Want a loving child? Love your spouse.
- Routine is the foundation of raising a remarkable kid.
- Do not underestimate the importance of anything in your children’s surroundings. Each and everything impacts their thinking. Do not overestimate the amount of control you have on your children.
- Make sure you speak multiple languages around your children. It will help them learn better.
- It is your job as a parent to provide them books. They will become readers themselves. It is your job to provide them with many options to eat from and they will eat on their own. Your job is to secure your handle. They will lift their side to handle themselves.
- Ultimate test of a parent is to teach their children how to deal and survive after their death. Ultimate test of a child is to handle their parent’s death with grace.
Hope so these insights will help you in having a great journey as a parent.
