Personal Essay: The Importance Of Raising A Child

To raise a child is not easy, to provide an education on top of a healthy family environment, food and clothes, entertaining and cultural moments, security and safety. It requires that parents set an example by their own lifestyles, being coherent and displaying integrity in their decisions. We can’t just write down a set of rules, pin them in the refrigerator and expect our kids to follow them. It requires dedication and reserve times in our daily lives to be open for dialogue, counsel and advice, to teach them about respect, discipline, sexuality, and friendship.

Your rules will be much better understood once you learn how to listen and then provide an answer, than to begin preaching to them about how it should be and menacing punishments. As a parent, I have learned to close my eyes to the small

They need to be free and do whatever they want.” I always believed that in the long run, my kids would be thankful for my recurring no’s and insistent reprimands.

For some of my friends the results were quite the opposite of what they would expect. Some of their children went through severe depressions, loss of interest in school, and developed anti-social behaviors. I don’t write this to prove anything, or to blame them for their position, but to show that there are real consequences when we neglect our duties as parents and become too friendly, too relaxed with discipline, allowing our children to do whatever they want.

I also had the same fears that they had, that my kids would fear me, more than respect, love me. I would fear the image of them growing older and becoming independent, that they would never come back to see me, or dump me in a retirement home. I feared that my kids would look at me as I did to my own parents. But, it was the discipline that we enforced, that eventually grew our family ties