Contributed by Solange Chin

Being a parent is not an easy task because the future of a child depends solely on the parents. Some parents in an attempt to nurture their children, engage into things that will ruin the children’s future. Below are few parenting mistakes.

Over protective: It is good to care for your children in order to protect them from taking wrong decisions. But being over protective does the child more harm than good in the long run. This is because, they know they are being restricted from certain activities, once they have liberty, they will learn to take advantage of the little space they have.

Bad modeling: Most parents are very good at implementing rules which they themselves do not follow. You should be what you say or what you want your kids to be. One cannot tell a child of how debauched, keeping late nights and drinking alcohol is, but does that all the time. Parents should note that, most children believe in them and thus anything they do will serve as a lesson to their children.

Criticism and comparison: As human beings I don’t think anybody enjoys comparison or criticism all the time yet some parents do that to their children. This only kills the strength in the child and weakens his or her ability to strive harder. Parents fail to understand that children are not the same and thus each child has his or her abilities. Statements such as “why are you not like that person … or why can’t you perform like that person…” are often used by some parents. All these make a child to feel worthless and growing up with such mentality will have a negative impact on the child.

Negligence: Due to work and time constraint, some parents turn to neglect their duties and this affects the lives of their children. Most often, they fail to give a listening ear to their kids and this in turn pushes the children to go out to seek advice from their friends or outsiders and it becomes a habit. Though they would not get the best advice they would have gotten if it were from their parents. Others take their eldest child to play their parental role forgetting it can never be the same thus the children misses parental nurture in their lives and some even become a threat to the society.

Finally, a majority of parents have the tendency of taking their children’s weaknesses or feelings to judge or contradict them rather than correcting them. When your child is able to reveal his or her feelings to you, do not judge them but rather listen to them and even share your experiences while you were younger and how you overcame those feelings or how you solved those problems.

Edited by Nicholine Akou