Being patient with kids

Patience is a quality that is essential to be inculcated in childrenright from the early age. It is the quality that becomes the strongestweapon to fight against many situations and problems in life. Theworld is moving rapidly and it forces people to run along, making themimpatient individuals.

It is a rare sight to see someone calm and patient in an age where everything has quick fix solutions. Hence even in families, parentsare seen to b more and more impatient with their kids. Patience isnecessary to make a family happy and at peace. As parents, it isnecessary that you be role models to your children. If parents startbecoming impatient, what are children learning and picking up at thisyoung age?

Try and spend some time alone keeping all the pending work and theto-do lists aside. I know that workaholics might feel a littledifficult to do that but it is essential. Force yourself into thishabit where you spend ten to fifteen minutes alone when your child hasgone to school. Think about things that make you feel happy. Mothers,especially house wives often lose their own self in giving themselvesto their families. Think of something that you always wanted to do. Itmay be paragliding or even scuba-diving. Imagine you are actuallyperforming the activity. It may help you to feel lighter. Other commonways to feel at peace are meditation, prayer and yoga along withbreathings exercises.

Image Courtesy: edytaszyszlo.com

Kids and Career

Let me tell you a story. There was this meeting taking place in one of the school. The meeting was primarily a reunion meet that focused upon living the old times. Most of the people present there were fondly remembering the old days and they were in those formative years. Many others talked about what was once expected of them and what they turned out to be. The findings were startling.

Many of those present there were proud parents of grown up kids. One of the parents vividly remembered the sobriquet given to him by his parents, teachers and batch mates. The lady in question was extremely shy and always struggled to get her sums right. She was declared as a ‘good for nothing’ also-ran. Her education and results were far from encouraging and her parents were tremendously worried for her. Currently she is an acclaimed dancer who has performed at several dance festivals and stage shows across the nation and in few other countries. Surprising, no!

The other individual present in the meet was never a bright student as far as academics is concerned. He like the former one swam against the tide and now a day, known as an established sports trainer. He brought glory and laurels to his college and his reputation as a coach is awe-inspiring. So where am I leading you with these stories? Yes, you guessed it right. It’s about kids and their chosen careers. The next article will elaborate on this crucial aspect.

Parenting values

Sometimes, parents need to educate themselves. There is no theory that says that parents can not make mistakes. After all they are humans and they are bound to make mistakes while dealing with the kids. It is natural. We all possess few great qualities and some shortcomings as well. Most often, our kids teach us in the best way possible. They don’t realize it but yes, they do leave an imprint of essential learning’ for parents. Few such moments make us introspect about our values and parenting style. The process of introspection makes us more aware of our values and needs. The more parents can identify with their values and understand their needs, better they will be as parents.

Keep checking parenting styles of your friends, colleagues and family members. It provides a great insight and is an amazing learning experience. We don’t always need to commit a mistake to learn essential things of life. That way, our whole lifetimes will not be enough to make us perfect. So it’s better to learn from others and cut upon our mistakes. We can always implement good qualities of others.

Talking about feelings is always a wonderful step towards achievement of parenting goals. Many parents don’t prefer to talk about feelings, thinking that children will learn on their own. But think of benefits if you start discussing feelings with kids. Children are exposed to stream of emotions at an early age. They can not comprehend all of them. Some make them sad and some others confuse them. Yes, they can cope up on their own but a little bit of guidance always comes handy.

Supporting Children

Many parents religiously indulge themselves in doing kids’ homework. They do it completely and thus easing all the home work blues of their children. Helping children, right? No, it is called rescuing children. Helping or supporting children is done when you assist them in doing their homework, when they falter at particular subjects and you guide them. Finishing homework on your own devoid children of several positive qualities which they were about to acquire. The actual problem lies in paucity of time. Parents after coming back to home still reel from day’s hard work and ubiquitous pressure. They assume, let’s finish the homework on our own because explaining kids the concept and teaching them thoroughly will take a lot of time and further increase our stress. So let’s choose the easy way out. But, hardly have they realized it’s a completely wrong way.

Parents must keep the fact in mind that supporting children by sacrificing our own personal time goes a long way in cultivating kids’ personality. Let the children master their subjects on their own. Let’s just guide them than jumping all the way and finishing homework in hurry. By supporting our children and helping them to master things is a sure shot way to enhance their self esteem and self confidence. This is also a way to encourage child’s independence and responsibility. Always remember, we are here to provide the basics for our kids. We are not here to let them take things for granted.

Importance of Family

Parenting involves a family. A complete family with father, mother and children. We all make new resolutions but most likely as individuals. The normal resolutions include things like, getting more focused, more organized, losing weight, achieving goals, improving relationships, behaving good, quitting smoking etc. But how often you have heard of family resolutions? Not many people have been found to prepare resolutions for family. If not then lets think of this fact for a while.

Major parts of our life spend with our family. We are so comfortable with are our family that we start taking it for granted. Our family provides us security. We take our meals with the family, with spouse, with kids. Infact, the comfort level is so extreme that we hardly ever think of them despite the fact that they are our lifelines. Let’s make a beginning. Lets make few resolutions and implement them and the result, well you will be surprised to see the difference in everyone around. The best result will be the sense of satisfaction you will have.

But before that try counting the number of days you have spent with your family. Also think of when was the last time you took your kids to playground. Not to forget when the last time was you spend some quality time with your spouse with nobody around. Does that strikes you? Hard to remember? Difficult to count such days? That’s what I meant by making resolutions for the family. Our future posts will focus upon several such resolutions implementing which will bring nothing but fulfilling experience in your life.

The Art of Parenting

Parenting is one of the most difficult as well as beautiful responsibility. The blog name says the beautiful art of parenting and yes, indeed it is! Ever seen a painter using brushstrokes on a blank canvas? Check his sincerity and carefulness while using the colors. Even the brushstrokes are so calculated so that the end result exactly comes out the way he wanted to. A slight miss of brush, a wrong usage of color and painting does not remain the same. Similarly with parenting, its nothing less than art which needs to be performed with utmost care, devotion and sincerity.

Every would-be parent aspires to be the greatest one. Most of them seek inspiration from their own parents and few others prefer to improve upon the parenting they received. Either way, the end result is ambition of proving to be the best ever parent. Parents want to give their best to their kids in terms of knowledge, wisdom and as we Indians love to call, ‘Sanskaras’. The art of parenting comes up with huge responsibility. Most of the people wonder, how do you define parenting? The answer is not easy because whatever we will say will turn out to be an ideal list yet there are few basic things associated with parenting. Apart from providing food, clothes and shelters to our children, parents love their kids unconditionally. They treat their kids equally and there is no gender bias. Parents also have the responsibility of guiding their children on the right path in the best way possible. Parents need to combine pragmatism and idealism while imparting values to their children. On that note, let’s try to learn the beautiful art of parenting.