Information to grow your skills about this topic comes from this article: Parenting Skills: 4 Ways we Learn to Parent & and the Good News About Our Parenting Potential.
Here is the selected information we have taken from this article:
KEY POINTS taken from the article. Please consider reading the entire article to gain more information to grow your parenting skills.
- Parenting can be perceived as a life-long journey and the many skills and strategies parents need starts at birth and
- continues into adulthood.
- The truth is “most of us become parents without training, “how-to manuals” or other specialty education. There is no simple formula.
- The main way we learned about parenting was watching our parents. Some of us were blessed with incredible parents or friends who modeled how to be patient and loving parents. Many of us were not so fortunate. We had parents who were trying to do their best but made many mistakes. Or, worse—had parents who were absent, neglectful, selfish, or even abusive.
- The good news is we can choose to learn and practice parenting skills and we can seek good parenting examples and emulate them. We can improve. All of us. Isn’t that great? All it takes is a commitment to being the best parent we can be.”
We believed what was stated above to be true when we first started working on this guide. After we did more research, we
found it was only partly true. The findings from various studies had some differences because a significant number of parents were not parenting in the same way as their parents.
The following information was taken from the article – Pew Research Center: How Today’s Parents Say Their Approach to Parenting Does-or Doesn’t Match Their Own Upbringing.
You may want to take some time to read the entire Pew Research Center article. We found the rest of the information in the article to be very informative.
The Pew Research Center findings:
They found after interviewing roughly 4000 parents that:
- About 43 % of the parents surveyed say they are raising their child similarly to how they were raised.
- About 44% indicated they were trying to take a different approach than how they were raised.
- About 12% say they’re neither trying to raise their children similarly to nor differently from how they were raised.
Today’s parents do differ in how they parent but this is expected because their parents parented differently than other parents. This suggests that we start our parenting with different levels of beliefs. That’s OK when we first start our parenting, but parents need to continue to improve their skills if they want to have a positive impact on the upbringing of their children through all stages of development from birth into adulthood. It appears that this may not be happening because findings show that 69% of all parents have no plans or strategies to raise their children to be successful adults. If this is true, and we think it is, it means many parents, regardless of their past learning experiences, may not have the skills at the present time that will be needed to be successful in fulfilling the growth factors that their children will experience during the various stages of life.
The question is: do you want to grow and improve the skills you are now using? If so, give some thought to how you will do this. It is not as difficult to do as it sounds. In fact, all parents are living and practicing their parenting skills each and every day, every month and every year. Learning more about parenting skills is similar to learning more about other types of skills. For example, let’s assume you are interested in learning how to bake a cake or improve your cake baking skills. You most likely do the following:
- Have reason(s) why you want to bake a cake.
- List the dishes and tools to use when baking a cake.
- Find the time needed to start and do the entire process.
- Obtain a recipe that is creditable, in print form and understandable.
- Self-assess your success based on the quality of the cake by asking yourself “is this the best I can do?” If the answer is “no or not sure” this does not mean you need to stop doing what you are doing immediately, but it does suggest that you may need to learn how to improve what you are doing by learning better ways.
- Continue to work on cake baking skills knowing that over time and by practicing, practicing, practicing, your baking skills will most likely improve unless you are practicing incorrect procedures.
Please Note: You can use this same learning model when you decide to grow and improve your parenting skills.
