LDA of Iowa's Parenting Guide: Part One

Section 1: Learning About the Parenting Guide

Our goal is to provide you with a guide that contains the information, strategies and skills that, if implemented consistently, will increase the possibility that parents will be successful raising their children to meet the standards noted by the American Psychological Association.

“Parenting practices around the world share three major goals: ensuring children’s health and safety, preparing children for life as productive adults, and transmitting cultural values. A high-quality parent-child relationship is critical for healthy development.”

American Psychological Association

Part One is like a 101 – introduction course. It is a roadmap that will help you start learning the skills, or improving the skills, you
need to raise your child to be a fully functional, successful adult. If this is your goal, what you learn in Part One will help you achieve it.

Our guide gives you information and skills for a lifetime of parenting. It starts when your child is born and continues until they’re grown up. This guide can be very helpful for all parents, no matter how much money or how much education they have. It teaches you most of the skills and strategies that parents need to:

Raise a child from birth to independent adulthood.
Facilitate the upbringing of a child through all stages of development – birth into adulthood.
Care for and nurture a child in a positive environment.
Fulfill the parenting responsibilities that accompany child-raising.
Care for a child rather than the biological connection to a child.
Establish a healthy environment as the child grows to ensure social development education that aligns with the parent’s values.
Adjust to the changing needs of a child as they grow and develop. 2

The “primary purpose of parenting is to raise fully functional adults who can care for themselves and make a contribution to society. This should be accomplished by eighteen. After this age, parents have less verbal influence but can still be a positive role model through actions, not words.” 3

We know that raising a child from birth to becoming a fully functional adult is not an easy task. Frankly, it was never meant
to be. But it WAS meant to be worth it! The truth is, parenting shapes our character just as much as it shapes our children’s. 4

Part One’s focus is on presenting the information to start your parenting growth process by sharing information in each of the following topics. Each of the topics will provide you with selected information needed to connect and develop a positive relationship with your children. But think of these as a chapter in a book. This suggests that you may only read one or two at each setting.

Learning about the parent guide
Learning about effective parenting
Learning about intentional parenting
Learning about intentional interactions
Learning about time management
Learning about specific interaction skills

Topic 1: What is the purpose of the parenting guide?

Before we developed this guide, we questioned the need because we had some awareness of the massive amount of parenting information that is available online and assumed that most parents would use the Internet and other options to enhance their parenting skills. But after visiting with some younger parents, we found that even though they had many options, they found that because of the massive amount of information available online, parents can spend hours searching for blogs, looking at parenting tips, and personal accounts on how to raise their children. While this can be informative, it is also time-consuming and confusing.

Topic 2: How Do Parents Learn Parenting Skills?

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.

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