One of the principles that I have learned about from this course is his how to adapt your parenting to fit your child. My main takeaway is that I need to adapt to what is going on with my child instead of making my child adapt to what I expect from them. During the process of parenting my child will go through many changes whether it be developmental growth, stress at school, or learning who they are. No parenting technique is going to be the magic technique that works for every single child that I may have. Every child is there own unique person with different personality traits. And because of that, as a parent, I am going to have to come up with my own unique parenting techniques that is going to be work for my child.

It’s so hard to let go and to let children make their own decisions. As an adult, I have gained maturity and responsibility as I have made decisions. I am not yet a parent, but I already feel the pressure of wanting my children to make good decisions. A part of this principle is to guide and allow your children to make decisions. While you don’t let them do whatever they want, it is important to give them some freedom in making decisions. Some of those decisions will be their friends, hobbies, or people that they choose to date. While as a parent, we might now agree with what they choose, to an extent, we have to allow them to make some choices so they can gain skills with their choices.

As a parent you have to adapt with their development. There’s the saying, once a child is your child they stop being one even though they may grow up and learn how to do things on their own. Sometimes parents have a hard time of letting go of where their child is at developmentally and in maturity. You get used to telling them to brush their teeth every day or even helping them get dressed. But the time comes where you have to let go and let your child take the reigns more and more with aspects of their life.

It is important to be flexible with your child. Your child is not always going to be the same. One day your daughter might think Twilight is the most amazing thing ever, and by the time you get used to that your daughter is all about Supernatural. The world is ever changing and your child notices and wants to be able to change with it whether to keep up with current trends, slang, or music artists.

As a parent, there is so much pressure to feel like you’re doing everything right. And no one wants to be that parent that lets their child run amuck. It’s hard to not feel like you need to be authoritative in order to be a good parent, but sometimes you need to be flexible and give up authoritative. Each child is growing up into own person and needs help becoming who they would like to be. They are going to have their own style of accomplishing tasks and it doesn’t help when parents dictate and micromanage every single aspect of that. The important thing is to realize that your child generally wants to listen and do what you ask them to do, but they are going to find their own way to do it. “Allowing your child to make his own decisions about clothes or other aspects of life, for that matter, will feel strange at first, because you will have grown accustomed to having virtually all of the control in your relationship. But this shift in authority is what he needs from you to be able to ultimately become a responsible young adult. There will come a day when he has to make his own decisions, and you want him to be able to do this with confidence and self-assurance. You don’t want to have to take him shopping when he is a young adult. ”

To conclude, I think the most important part of adapting to the needs of your child is to help them make the right decision at a young so when they grow and develop into an adult, you know that you have lead them the down the best path that they have. A role as a parent is to not make control who your child is going to be, but to teach how to be successful in the real world with skills and hopefully a little bit of wisdom.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton