What's the one thing that as parents, you must teach your children?
Do you remember the early years of your child? That time when your little baby, this teeny tiny thing, was so helpless, that you had to be on stand-by mode 24/7?
Of course, you remember! Those are the golden memories, isn't it?
The only problem is that your subconscious mind ends up still believing that your child is helpless, he/she needs rescuing, helping, supporting. And that he cannot survive without you.
Are you raising your child to be dependent or independent?
When children are young, they depend on us for food, for helping them maneuver their routine and for supporting them with homework and school. When they are slightly older, they become more independent in those areas, but continue depending on us for emotional support and guidance.
This kind of dependence prevents them from feeling confident and capable of living by themselves when they grow up into young adults. They might not tell you this, but deep down they may be fearful living by themselves, handling problematic situations and taking important decisions.
Too much dependency on parents affects the child's confidence and self-esteem
As parents, we need to help them get completely independent: physically, practically and emotionally. This is a crucial aspect of parenting, which is often overlooked.
As a young parent, many years back, I really struggled in teaching them independence. It's not that I did not make any efforts. I was aware of this crucial teaching and I did really try.
How and what did I teach my children in order for them to be independent?
- I encouraged them to do chores in the house. Early in life, they would help me with grocery shopping, cleaning the table after meals and even running errands as they grew up a little.
- I nudged them into packing their own bags for school, doing their homework by themselves and being accountable for all things academic.
- I also encouraged them to walk to the school bus themselves and later walk to school. I also encouraged one of my daughters to eat by herself right from when she was young (I did struggle on that with my other one).
What I wished I had also taught them?
- I wasn't too aware of the need for emotional independence then. I didn't know how to regulate my own emotions and did not teach them that. However, thankfully, my awareness expanded by the time they were teens and then, I spoke openly about emotional management and that helped.
- We know now that cooking is a life skill, like swimming. While I had taken some efforts to get them educated into swimming, I hadn't particularly focussed on getting them cooking lessons.
There are many more things I can add to these two lists. But the point is not about 'perfect parenting'.
Anyway, there is no such thing as 'perfect parenting'; we are getting trained in parenting while raising them. It's an on-the-job training.
Making our children independent is a crucial aspect of parenting
But, I do want to highlight that, we have to bring this aspect of making our children independent as a priority. It is a crucial aspect of parenting. However, we find so many parents trying to rescue their children, over protecting them and not allowing them to take risks.
The biggest cause for anxiety nowadays is rescuing and overprotecting your child
In my opinion, this is the biggest cause for so much anxiety in children nowadays. There are other reasons for anxiety in children, but rescuing, and preventing our children from making their own mistakes is the biggest cause, that's my opinion.
However a lot of this is not consciously done, it is mostly a subconscious tendency in the parents. Most parents will tell you, I don't rescue, I allow my child to be independent, to experiment; but I can't let him make bad choices that would end up being disastrous for him, can I?
As parents, we subconsciously believe that they cannot do this, that they are not ready.
As parents, we are consciously doing all that we can to make them independent; on the other hand subconsciously, a part of us still believes that they are not ready to face this big bad world!
Not ready to face the world? How did we get ready? How did we learn to cope practically, emotionally. By learning, by seeing role models and then trying to do that by ourselves.
The only way our child will get ready is by role modeling for them, by showing how to and then allowing them to try, to stumble, to fail and encouraging them at every step of that journey.
Children need to be exposed to taking small and medium risks, they need to be allowed make mistakes and then learning from that and they need to make their own age appropriate decisions and again learn from that.
This is the only way that they can get independent. The only way they can get ready to be by themselves.
What happens if our child continues their dependence on parents?
- This kind of dependence prevents them from feeling confident and capable of living by themselves when they grow up into young adults.
- They might not tell you this, but deep down they may be fearful living by themselves, handling problematic situations and taking important decisions.
- Dependence on parents prevents them from taking responsibility and accountability.
- Emotional dependence prevents the child from developing more awareness of their feelings and lack of skills to co-regulate their emotions. This affects their mental health.
To conclude, I would say that, as parents, we need to help them get completely independent: physically, practically and emotionally.
When they can manage without us and are not dependent on our emotional and physical support, we can say with certainty that we have completed our parenting tasks well.
This kind of independence is really hard but is something we should definitely aspire towards.
Does this seem like an uphill climb?
Well, it's true what was said that, Parenting is about raising our own consciousness. Nobody can make us change as much as our children. And that's the beauty of it!
