Good Parenting: Raising Responsive and Responsible Children

What You Need to Know

Challenges we face:

• Time Challenge –  Children in the United States now spend 10-15 fewer hours per week with their parents than children in the 1960s. Since then, parents have seen less and less time with their children, less sleep, and less personal time, due to more work pressures – combined with increased pressure in kids today to strive to do it all.
• Media Challenge – As the media's presence in our lives increases, vast amounts of information and entertainments present positive and negative influences. A growing number of messages reflect disrespectful, antisocial, promiscuous or aggressive behavior that conflicts with the values you aim to instill.
• Leisure Challenge – The number of teens participating in school-related activities outside of class fell from 82% in 1998 to 77% in 1999. Balancing adequate time for leisure with contributions to the family, contributions to the community, and contributions to personal development sets the stage for a balanced, fulfilled adult lives. If time is squandered, however, skills and talents atrophy. When adolescents haven't learned to use time constructively, they seek cheap thrills through risky actions.
• Adolescence Challenge – Children feel pressure of adult responsibilities and dilemmas at earlier and earlier ages, and with less contact between children and parents, problems during this stage have increased. 

How You Can Help

A useful way to view your parenting task is as a balancing act, involving:

• Balancing parental information with outside information - Make sure the information and imagery your child receives through media are appropriately balanced with information and discussion about values and appropriateness from you.
• Balancing parental involvement with youthful freedom - Allow your child to explore the world in reasonable, age-appropriate doses. Even when exposed to television shows, songs, toys or games at odds with parental values, your guidance can teach your child to be a critical thinker and make informed judgments.
• Balancing supervision with freedom  – Children take the most advantage of high-risk actions between the hours of 3-7pm on weekdays – the unsupervised time from when they leave school until when parents arrive home from work. However, parents can be alert to children's activities by setting up specific plans and expectations.
• Balancing service to self with service to others – Encouraging your child to volunteer in an after school program or other charitable activities gives a sense of his ability to contribute to the good of the world.

For more on this topic, please see the full article:

http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Raising_Responsive/