One of the things you quickly learn when you become a new parent is that you really don’t know what you are doing. Sure, you usually try what your parents did, but for many situations, you are really not armed with enough knowledge to be able to handle every situation that comes your way.
So you usually just wing it.
But winging it only gets you so far. One of the best learning tools that I have found for learning what works when it comes to parenting would be from observing others. This can be as simple as seeing what your friends are doing and borrowing those things that do work and apply it to your own situation. In these cases if you don’t see what you need to learn, you can always talk to people you know that are parents and just ask them if they know what to do.
One of the less talked about ways to learn how to parent better is to watch what your friends do poorly and learn from bad situations. In fact, one of the best places to learn this way would be to go to the places where kids behave badly including shopping stores, playgrounds and pretty much anywhere public and just watch. You will see a lot of bad parenting going on, but there are also opportunities to see examples of good parenting.
Like any situation, take what you learn, soak it in, and the apply it to your parenting skill set. By taking the time to work on developing your parenting skills, you will not only do better as a parent, but will have well behaved, well-adjusted kids as a result.
Topics #learning #parenting
I know that we learned a lot from other couples that we knew as to what worked for parenting and what didn’t. I am sure we also serve as an example to others – we don’t always do the right thing either, but somehow we stumble through it.
Jose Pretto recently posted..Drinking A Lot Of Coffee
I think we all learn our parenting skills from others. When you consider that most of what we do as parents is very similar to how our own parents raised us, I would think that we all mimic what happened to us when we were younger.