Parenting is a hard job. For someone who has never had to parent it can be difficult to understand what the job is like. There are always mixed emotions of fear, happiness, love, and much more that is a parent’s life. For most it is hard to describe what being a parent is as well as how they managed to raise their wonderful children. All a parent can really do is provide advice for new parents on parenting in order to help ease some of the fears. Many fears go into raising a child, like will you mess them up, will they be wonderful adults, will they survive on their own, and must more. One aspect of parenting is discipline. Discipline is a hard task to have as you don’t want to hurt the child’s emotional development. Many of us are afraid that discipline will really affect the child, but this doesn’t have to be the case. In psychology a student learns about positive and negative reinforcement and how it can affect any individual, not just children, but adults as well.
We all need to have words of encouragement, praise, and to generally feel happy about ourselves. Our parents are going to make that happen, when they illicit the proper parenting techniques. While discipline is needed on occasion the need for praise and teaching self esteem is even higher. Here is an example: A child went through life with parents who always disciplined her when she did something wrong, but when she got straight A’s, made the honor roll, and excelled in her life she was never given the proper words of encouragement. As the years went by she began to display more and more behavioral issues. She would act out, she stopped doing well in school, and eventually she just left at the age of eighteen, a broken child with low self esteem.
The point of the example is that the child needed to hear both things from her parents. Since she was not shown the positive aspects of life, she strived to cause trouble for someone to notice her, and she eventually gave up and didn’t become the person she could have been. Parenting is about giving your child options, allowing them to grow in their personality and behaviors, but of course to also shape them in a moral and ethical way. For a child to be successful they need just as much or more positive reinforcement. It can take twenty years to build self esteem, and only one to totally destroy a person’s confidence in them. Positive reinforcement is about offering praise when it is do. It is about giving kind words even when it isn’t. A simple, “I love you” or “You did a really great thing the other day,” can help a child become more confident in themselves. Positive reinforcement helps to establish the correct behavior you would like to see. Above all positive reinforcement is important to parenting so that your child can be the person they should be.