Among the most prominent needs experienced by children in the family between the ages of 1 and 12, and which must therefore be nurtured in terms of quality, quantity, timing, and outcomes to develop their desired psychosocial adjustment, are the following:
1- Fun and Entertainment: Sharing with the family (primarily parents and older siblings) opportunities to play, engage in fun, funny, or joyful situations, and experience the joys of life in general.
2- Affection and Tenderness: Parents embracing their children and making them feel cared for and cared for makes them feel the warmth, affection, and friendship of the world around them.
3- Acceptance: Accepting children as they are, with their strengths and weaknesses, and appreciating their abilities is important for their confidence in their humanity and talents.
4- Respect: Treating children with respect by the family, recognizing that each child is important in his or her own right, teaches them, as individuals and as a group, how to respect themselves and the people around them.
5- Praise and Encouragement: Children’s awareness of their achievements and behavior through family feedback, praise, and encouragement, develops a sense of superiority and the potential for future progress.
6- Security and Safety: Sparing children from threats, mood swings, family conflicts, and daily life’s unforeseen situations and opportunities enhances self-confidence, a sense of freedom from fear and hesitation, and a sense of security and stability within themselves.
7- Honesty: Family members’ integrity in dealing with others, avoiding manipulation and manipulation, and being honest (not lying), even when discussing mistakes, all teach children how to be consistent, open, and truthful in expressing themselves and disclosing to their family what is happening in their environment, regardless of their mistakes or failures.
8- Patience: Giving children opportunities to think, reflect, and experiment with what they are doing, understanding their circumstances, and not rushing to negatively judge them. All of these factors encourage them to pursue their goals or ambitions with little hesitation, frustration, or self-doubt.
9- Forgiveness and Tolerance: Reminding children of human imperfection and the importance of flexibility in accepting others and their actions without ill feelings toward them helps them (the children) in the future gain a deeper understanding of life and people, comprehend various circumstances, and become closer psychologically to them.
10- Openness: The family listens to children with an open mind and inclination, without prejudice or preconceived notions, and understands and accepts what they say, feel, and do… even feeling that they can learn from them when they are precise or distinctive. This motivates them to be open-minded and open-minded in their interactions with others, and to be confident in their future progress.
11- Love: Love is the common behavioral, emotional, and human factor in a family’s interaction with children in fulfilling the ten needs mentioned above. When families master this love, they provide children with healthy personalities that are psychologically and socially compatible with themselves, with civil society, and with life.
Balancing Childrearing Responsibilities with the Demands of Working Outside the Home
One of the most difficult issues facing working parents in raising their children and managing family life is balancing their responsibilities toward their children—to educate and guide them, as required by their desired successful parenting—with the demands of working outside the home to secure sufficient funding for the family’s daily needs and their children’s academic and personal progress.
Families are expected to overcome this compulsive situation of making mature family decisions and raising children by considering two important principles for reconciling the responsibilities of raising children and working outside the home: balancing the guidance preferences available to both parents, and then maintaining a balance between raising children and saving money with work outside the home.
In examining daily preferences, parents analyze the degrees of importance of their duties related to childrearing and working outside the home, and the impact of each on the children’s development and the stability of family life. If the family works outside the home, for example, with two jobs: a primary job in the morning and an additional job in the evening, with the goal of providing a comfortable life for the family, meeting all the regular and additional needs of the children, and such extended dual work is at the expense of the quality and amount of time available to interact with, educate, guide, and direct their children, negatively impacting their performance and outcomes, then the father and/or mother may choose to forgo the additional evening job, or one of them may, in urgent cases of childrearing, for the benefit of the family and children’s future.
Balance, as a second procedural principle in reconciling the responsibilities of raising children and working outside the home, requires the parents to conduct an analytical study of the duties of raising children and working outside the home, eliminating secondary duties through the previous comparison process. The father and mother then draw up an organizational chart regarding the roles, behaviors, and expected timings of their roles within the family to meet the children’s needs for education, guidance, direction, and follow-up.
In conclusion, we emphasize the need for fathers and mothers to seriously consider their current parental responsibilities: balancing family upbringing with work abroad, and performing them precisely and purposefully to the fullest extent, using the same balance and preferences we have outlined. Failure to achieve this balance could undermine the parenting of working fathers and mothers, and weaken the intended positive outcomes for the children’s development and future, as well as the stability of family life, to an entirely undesirable degree.