The skills to be a parent are learned and perfected as you and your children grow older, with many people actively seeking to refine these long before the children are even born. However, knowing what these skills are is already a challenge, and knowing which skills are more important than the next is something you can see some parent scratching their head about for hours on end.
You need to have patience, discipline, communication, and financial awareness as a parent to ensure that you and your children are living comfortably. Further, all parents need to be teachers, entertainers, friends, rocks, multitasking, and most importantly to be a parent. These are the basic skills that you will need as a parent and the other skills that you will need to make yourself clear as you learn more about your children.
Usually, people are surprised to learn the things that they need to even be the parents of a toddler, with children in primary schools, entering their teenage years, and becoming young adults pushing you to the limit. This is why you usually see that people are completely changed when they become parents and knowing what the basic skills are or which are the more advanced skills will take you a long way.
How do you learn parenting skills?
The first time you will learn parenting skills is from your parents, the things they do to teach you your skills, the advice they give as you grow up, and the things they tell you as you prepare to be a parent. These are what sets you up with your basic parenting skills, which is why many people adopt some similarities to their parents. (Source: Dr. Christin Hibbert)
When you start looking and actively finding skills to be a parent you will start looking at people that are already parents, learning what to do from them, or what not to do. This is a great source of learning skills, which can be just as effective as learning from books, videos, and seminars. Learning as much as you can from others is a great way to know what to focus on before it becomes too late to prepare.
The last way, and possibly the most effective way, is by on-the-job training of being a parent, your skills will skyrocket once you have to start taking care of your children. Many people learn a great deal of the skills they need when it’s required to use the skill, there is no time to read a book, call a friend, or watch a video when you need to change a diaper that contains something that you can barely describe.
What skills should you focus on?
You should focus on the fact that you will be a leader to all of your children, so having the skills to be a good leader will have you raise a healthy child. As the leader, together with the other parent, you are going to be the first and most important role model and mentor for your children. The decisions that you make will affect how they see the world, how they understand it, and how prepared they are for its challenges. (Source: Tinies)
Further, you should focus on your negotiating skills, as these will be important throughout the young lives of your children. This is because you need to not only negotiate with them, but you also need to negotiate with everyone you are meeting, deciding who to trust and what is allowed within your home.
After you have these basic skills down you also need to learn to be calm under pressure, many parents are some of the most patient people in the world. This is because they have learned how to handle every situation without freaking out, taking the problems one step at a time until they are solved and no longer an issue. A dash of creativity throughout all of these will help you gain the trust and love of any of your children.
Is parenting easy?
Parenting is not an easy journey to undertake and it is possibly one of the hardest things you will do in your life, as it is something that will never stop. You are a parent from the moment you start the journey, and many times people that are trying their hardest are not entirely prepared for it. This is because becoming a parent is never easy and should not be a decision made on a whim.
While being a parent is not an easy thing to do, being a parent is one of the most rewarding things anyone can experience in their lives. This is why you will hear stories from parents that look like they haven’t slept in years about how great it has been to be a parent. Many times, the challenge of being a parent comes from being ill-prepared for some of the troubles that will be faced.
This is why you can usually find people become better parents as they grow up with their children, with the second child they may have down the line being a lot easier to handle. Most people will become more skilled at being a parent, thus making it easier to be a parent as time goes by. However, children never stay the same age, and as such once you have the skills to handle one age you will have to adapt to the next age.
What are the most important skills to have?
There are several things that you will need to have in your repertoire once you are a parent, each of which you can start learning long before you become a parent. Usually, people will go out of their way to learn as many skills as they can while being a parent, focusing on the skills they know they aren’t good at.
Many parents have faced the challenge of not having everything perfectly ready and going for their children. However, fortunately being adaptable, and raising a child is not a perfect art and making mistakes is not only natural but something that will happen. No parents on earth have been perfect every day and having toe skills to adapt to these days will greatly increase your performance. (Source: Daniel Wong, Skills You Need)
- Focus on behavior: The behavior of your children, and you is what will decide a lot of the other skills you will need. If you do not trust your children to be on their own after a certain age then you know you should be focusing on this skill. Your behavior to certain subjects, problems, or people will set the groundwork for your children.
- Teach the needs: It sounds weird in the modern world but teaching children that there is a greater pleasure to be found by giving to those who need is important. Research has shown that children enjoy giving to others a lot more, especially if it is sacrificial giving. Teaching your children to accurately do this will help you and them grow more.
- Don’t shout too much: Shouting at your children will have the opposite effect of what you may think, while it is inevitable to happen, especially with younger parents. This is why you need to learn not to shout, instead of focusing on reasoning, and more constructive forms of punishment. Shouting is a gut reaction, but rarely produces the results that are needed.
- Entertaining Your Children: A big problem faced in the modern world, with smaller apartments, city living, and more children can become hard to entertain. However, this is an important skill that all parents should have, as a child that is entertained while coloring, playing blocks, or just anything else will be much calmer.
- Learning and Development: As a parent, you must be the first teacher your children will ever have, and it is through this that you need to have the skills to help them learn in all aspects. From learning how to walk, learning how to ride a bike, or learning how to deal with love once they have grown up. Parents will be the first people to teach their children about these.
- Teach positive Challenge Focus: A thing that is hard to do, even as an adult, is looking at challenges in a positive light. However, this is the first thing you should be teaching your children as they grow up, challenges in life should not be seen as negatives. Teaching how to overcome challenges and view them as a positive thing to learn from is an important part of being a parent.
Conclusion
The skills that you need to have as a parent is not something you can learn with ease, with many parents around the world having to take a few lessons to become better. Realizing what skills, you still need to learn is what will set you apart from the rest, a parent that assumes things come naturally will rarely be able to be the best parent.
A natural talent that is never polished might as well never have existed; this is true with being a parent as much as anything else.
