THE PARENTING SERIES: RAISING RESILENT KIDS FOR AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

The most important thing when it comes to raising children in the modern world is to be accessible and avaliable. Which is easier said than done, when you consider that the average family has both parents working full time to keep up with the mortgage and the rising costs of living.

Imagine, working in a Central Business Hub (CBD), which involves a significant amount of commuting. Out of the house by 8am and back home at 6:30pm. So we send our children to extended daycare. We are exhausted after work and haven't had the chance to decompress and still need to make sure that the children are fed, showered, doing well, and ready for bed. Presuming the child sleeps at 9:30pm, we are only accessible and avaliable to our child on the weekends, in the small period of time before we leave for work in the morning and after showering/dinner on weekdays.

Is this arrangement enough to raise healthy, emotionally intelligent/resilient and independent children in the modern world?

Due to the advancement in technology, we are living in the digital age. With information, connnections and influences a touch away. Never have we had such an abundance of access to free education, information, connections and opportunities, but these benefits are also double edged as it has also never been easier for us to come into contact with and be contacted by the dark, evil, greedy and unhinged parts of humanity.

Children spend more meaningful time on their devices than with their parents or good role models. With content online mainly being "brain rot" designed to be attention grabbing, controversial, addictive, predatory, scripted/fake and a medium for advertising and marketing looking to exploit as many people/children as possible.

Being present to protect, educate and guide your child through navigating this vast, beautiful, yet dark digital world is invaluable.

Be present,

Be accessible,

Be available,

Be a parent.

BE ACCESSIBLE AND AVAILABLE

ESTABLISH HEALTHY PRINCIPLES AND SYSTEMS

ROLEMODEL AND INSTILL DISICIPLINE

PROVIDE LOVE AND SECURITY

BE CONSISTENT AND RELIABLE

How can one be consistent and reliable?

Well you just have to put in the effort to align your words with your actions!

Which is much, much easier said than done when you consider all the responsibilities, stress, distraction and temptations that people face today.

But it is exactly this effort that means everything to children. In a world of chaos and unknown. They look to you as parents for security, support and ultimately hope.

When you tell them you will spend time and play with them later. make sure you do. When you are faced with stress and temptations, show them that you can overcome them.

You cannot be and will not be perfect as parents, but you can strive to learn to be positive, consistent and reliable!

I think we all know the power and value of habits and systems. They serve to protect us from the temptations of the world and prevent us from spirailng out of control when we are out of discipline and willpower.

Children are joyful bundles of curiosity, selfishness and love. In fact they are generally pretty simple to understand, they are seeking a combination of love, attention, affection, food/water, rest/sleep and/or play. They are innocent, curious but also unaware of their own limitations. Children will gorge themselves with unhealthy foods, play till exhaustion and even stray onto the path of danger to seek their simple pleasures.

This is why it is extremely important to establish healthy systems that will serve to protect and guide them towards a balanced lifestyle and a secure future.

Examples of this include but are not limited to modelling, providing education on and establishing healthy diets (well balanced diets of home cooked meals), physical exercise (regular exercise), sufficient sleep quality and quantity (consistent sleep/wake times, good sleeping habits), good communication and social skills (being a good listener, able to understand and navigate social/play dynamics, good manners, and able to modulate their communication to different environments and people), emotional intelligence and regulation (emotional awareness, empathy, appriopiate regulation strategies and the capacity to process and communicate one's emotions) and principles to managing technology/device and social media use (no devices during meal times and in the bathroom, preserving one's attention span and capacity to concentrate and experience relaxation/boredom, understanding the nature of social media and fake news, the dangers of the internet and the predatory nature of modern gaming).

However, this doesn't mean to overprotect them or to create long term codependency. We want to cultivate independence, autonomy and resilience, because the reality is that temptations, distractions and dangers will always exist in the world.

We won't always be around and there for them. We won't always have the energy, disipline, willpower and wisdom to make the right decisions. In these moments of weaknesses, we can at least trust that the healthy principles, habits and systems that we've instilled will protect us and our children from making the worse decisions.

What are you and your family's current principles, habits and systems?

Are they healthy?

I want you all to imagine a world where speed signs are just a recommendation. The police don’t exist. There are no speed cameras. There are no speeding fines or laws.

Would you follow the speed limit? If yes, how often would you do so?

Now I want you to think what would a child or teenager do in this situation? Would they follow the speed signs? Probably not right!

Children are driven by their curiosity, urge to play and to test their limits. Accountability, discipline and willpower are not things that they have much of or have developed yet.

So whose responsibility is it to model and teach them these things?

Unfortunately, society, teachers, coaches and even the police are no longer in the position to hold children accountable and instill these values.

I want you to think about what happens when a child refuses to follow rules and instructions at school and in society today? Not much to be honest because we as a society are no longer allowed to discipline or hold children accountable and as a result the future of our children will suffer as a consequence.

We want our children to be protected, pampered and sheltered from the dangers, conflicts and sufferings of life. We spoil them, turn a blind eye and enable their unhealthy and undesired behaviours as parents. Thus, they stay children, not ready for the harshness of the reality of the world. They lack the character, resolve and disicipline that comes from making mistakes and overcoming hardships. They choose to stray from the path to adulthood and independence.

There are no significant consequences for children's bad behaviours and decision making and their is no authority that is able to hold them accountable once they have strayed from the right path. That is until they are recognised as an adult at the age of 18...

Once they turn 18, the world shifts and turns against them:
- the rules that they thought they were exempt from now have severe conseqeucnes
- the support and benefit of the doubt they had from society and others vanishes
- the lack of accountability and disicipline makes them unemployable
- their undesired attitudes and behaviours make them unsocialable and excluded

The once kind and soft world becomes extremely hostile and unforgiving. These children, now adults, no longer know how to function and survive in this harsh new reality. They have to struggle, to learn, to start anew.

Is this the future you want for your child?

This is why the emphasis falls on the parents to role model accountability and discipline. Conflict, pain and suffering is an inevitable part of this process and life, but the reward is immense. The gift that is the tools and the temperament to navigate and be succcessful in the modern world as an adult.

Model, reward and incentivise desired behaviours, and when required, be the police/or cop to their speeding.

We’ve learned that we do need to learn and be the bad cop sometimes. To instill accountability and disicipline.

However, we aren’t perfect as humans, and neither will we be perfect as parents. So it would be unreasonable to expect perfection from children. We all make mistakes, have tough/rough days, and experience moments of weakness and irrationality, including children!

This is the process that everyone experiences and goes through to learn and progress through the realities that is the harshness of life. This is why the provision of love and security is essential to nurture and guide children through these tough tender moments.

A safe space to take risks, be vulnerable, to rest and recoup, process and rebuild themselves.

The difficulty is in the balance of good/bad cop, yin and yang, hard and soft and tough/tender love. To learn how to be and when to be both and in what capacity is best for our children.

To be both a source of accountability and disicipline but also love and security.