Parenting According To Freakonomics By Steven Levitt And Stephen Dubner

Evan Sanchez
Professor Amidon
17 October 2015
What is the perfect parent?
As I’ve grown up I’ve always wished my parents would be just a little more lenient, I mean doesn’t every kid? However, we don’t tend to focus on why our parents set guidelines and why they have restrictions set towards us. Parenting is defined as influence and discipline of a child by providing them with special love, care and guidance as a parent. Parenting begins to set sail when a child comes into someones life and demands a lot of responsibilities, sacrifices and hard work. According to Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, parenting holds a massive impact about how the child is raised and how the child's mentality develops as they begin to mature overtime.

However, what did this firm set of rules do to me as I got older and more mature? Parents tend to believe that being one-hundred percent strict and controlling is the perfect foundation for their child to excel in school and social activities, sadly, they are completely wrong. When the parents are hovering over their child's life, the child realize’s that they really have no personal space at all and just want to get out of this “hell hole” in which they call home. Throughout high school I was an extremely defiant kid. But why? Personally, the reason I was defiant was fueled by my parents never giving me a chance to have any independence and it only frustrated me so much that I wanted to do nothing they wanted me to do. There was a quote that I saw on Twitter a couple days ago and it stated “Strict parents create sneaky kids.” This statement can’t be more correct. However, being defiant lead to discipline and it was

The foundation and idea of a consequence for a wrongful action sets down a ground basis which enables the child to gain an idea of “right” from “wrong” at such a young age. However, using physical discipline can only make a problem worse. When I was young, my real father had a lot of anger issues. There were days where my father would come home and would simply find things to get mad about and take it out on my little brother and I. All this did for my brother and I was create ultimate fear towards our father. It caused us to never be defiant or raise our voice towards him. As many people may see the ultimate obedience as a positive affect, what was it like for me growing up in fear of my father? Well I’ll tell you, it wasn’t good. An article about Child Discipline stated “While it may teach a child what not to do, it fails to teach a child what is expected of him or her and what is an alternate behavior”(Straus, Sugarman,, & Giles-Sims). Many parents struggle with the idea of what the perfect discipline is or what the perfect parenting overall is and what we should do to be able to focus on strategies that would overall help our parenting