As we bring up our children, we try our best to instill in them values that will serve as basic and firm foundations for their set beliefs. As parents, it is our responsibility to bring up our children well and when we find them straying from the straight and narrow path, we cannot just throw the responsibility to someone else or leave their upbringing to chance. Through the various seminars we give on a wide range of topics in parenting and through my encounters with experts in my show Momworks (now on its fourth season at the Lifestyle Network), I realize that parents’ main concern revolves around disciplining their children and their desire to learn the best way to enable the child to obey.
Much of the frustrations in disciplining their kids, especially for busy parents, stem from not having enough time to instill regulations to set guidelines for proper behavior and not having enough energy to consistently monitor how their children are doing. As we all know, the bulk of parenting children nowadays is delegated to parent-partners, like relatives and hired caregivers, because a significant portion of the parent-population consists of working parents and overseas workers. Truth is, aside from having to discipline our own children, we must also equip our parent-partners to align with our ideas of how we want our children to grow. It is quite a challenging task for parents, but it is very important for them to take this seriously.
Why do we need to instill discipline in our children anyway? We instill discipline in order to arm them with the proper tools for surviving in the real world while creating a harmonious relationship with others around them. How well we instill such learning ushers them into forming set ways of identifying choices on how they live their lives. In their book, Growing Kids God’s Way, Garry and Anne Marie Ezzo share that parents must set boundaries and give little freedom during the formative years of a child. As the child grows up with a proper understanding of the boundaries and is given more responsibilities, they may slowly be given more freedom to exercise their choices. Giving a child too much freedom at a very young age endangers the child.
Children long for boundaries because they make the child feel safe with his/her surroundings. An example that the Ezzos gave is when a child is placed in an enclosed area and left alone to play. The child explores all the possible areas of play within the perimeter of the area, not going beyond it. On the other hand, the same child is placed in an open field and left alone to play. Instead of running freely, the child stays in one corner of the field and just sits there. The vast field will not provide a safe place to play in for the child.
Aside from boundaries, children long for their elders to show them the right way and provide consequences for their right or wrong behaviors. Dr. Honey Carandang relates that her son, who was two years old then, asked her to reprimand him for his wrong behavior. While busily correcting a thesis, Dr. Carandang didn’t notice her son had put his dirty boots on her bed and did it to wait for what his mom would do next. Noticing that she didn’t mind his unacceptable behavior, he then blurted out the need for her to correct him.
A counselor friend narrates how one of her counselees shared her lonely growing-up years feeling unloved by overly permissive parents who were too busy to spend time with her. Her parents showered her with material gifts and all her heart’s desires that they could afford. They never said no to her whims and wants, hoping to make their child feel loved. As a result, she grew up feeling unloved, unwanted, and a total wreck for outside the comforts of her home, she experienced rejection and failure, which she was never equipped to handle.
When children are left in the care of unavailable and irresponsible parents, society takes over to mold the child. Because children naturally gravitate towards where they find belongingness, they cling to whatever comes their way that naturally satisfies that desire. Being exposed to an NGO who works to rehabilitate women from the streets, I gathered that a sexually abused child has high chances of ending up being promiscuous or even as a prostitute. Studies show that majority of children who have experienced repeated or even one-time molestation and abuse at a young age, when left unprocessed, naturally enter the dark world of prostitution because it provides the answers to longings left unprocessed by the supposed adults who are responsible for that child.
In my encounters with battered women, I have learned that their tolerance for abuse depends on how much they’ve been able to take while growing up in a home where abuse was also present. Women who have been exposed to being screamed at while young or are used to being a witness to their parents’ constant fighting may develop a high tolerance for abuse, which then makes them susceptible victims of domestic abuse later in life. The result is quite alarming because women only try to find an escape from a life of torture at home when their lives are already at stake. One of the women even shared that for as long as she still can take the beatings, she’ll stay. Of course, some end up taking their own lives instead for failure to get a hold of their deep emotional scars.
All our choices, especially in rearing our children, lead to consequences that later on will be of benefit or deficit to society. Those are things our conscience will have to live with for the rest of our lives according to the good or bad choices we make. May God have mercy on us!