Organized family management of children, both within and outside the family environment, is one of the most important responsibilities of successful parenting. Failure by parents to “take control” of their children’s lives, i.e., allowing things to proceed unchecked within the family, and within the relationships and duties of family members, including children, poses the most serious risks, not only to the future development of the children, but also to the cohesion of the family and the continuity of family life.
The reasons for these risks to the upbringing and personalities of children are due to the administrative vacuum resulting from the family’s lack of rules, laws, customs, or traditions to organize and manage the affairs, interventions, and interactions of its daily life. This encourages members in general, and children in particular, to legislate and implement laws and customs that appeal to each of them. This transforms the family, when children become extremists, careless, or behaviorally undisciplined, into a residential home, where members choose to coexist as psychological strangers within daily routines that, at best, help them survive financially.
In its organized management of children, the family is expected to implement rules and customs that address all areas, relationships, activities, and family situations in general, without ever delving into specific details.
Examples of these family administrative areas include:
1. Etiquette for children’s interactions with each other as siblings, and then their interactions with the father, mother, relatives, and acquaintances within and outside the family environment.
2. Etiquette and rules for entering and leaving the home.
3. Rules for watching or using computers, the internet, and television stations, in terms of goals, times, and available time (see in this context our book in the current family science series: “Children’s Safety on the Internet”.
4. Rules for daily family duties and customs, starting with meals, general personal hygiene, waking and sleeping times, clothing, studying and doing homework, sharing household responsibilities, and many other aspects of daily family administration.
5- Provisions for general behavioral discipline for children, specifications for appropriate and improper behavior, and types of accountability, both positive and negative.
6- Continuous, systematic monitoring of children’s activities and events within and outside the family, objective accountability, and scientific correction of errors whenever necessary.
Preparing children to adapt to major life and school changes
Family, school, and general social life is a successive series of events and changes, normal or sometimes radical, that children find difficult to understand or comprehend psychologically and behaviorally. Examples of major transformations that families are expected to take into account, explain their significance, justify their occurrence, and explain their consequences for children include the arrival of a new sibling; their transition from one developmental stage to another (from infancy to early childhood, middle childhood, late childhood, then young adulthood, adolescence, and adulthood); their academic progress from kindergarten to primary school, middle school, and then high school; the family moving from one home, city, or country to another for family or work reasons; and general social, administrative, and political changes.
To achieve the successful parenting they aspire to, families are expected to mitigate the impact of major events and changes on their children’s psychological well-being and help them understand and comprehend them cognitively and behaviorally, preparing them to adapt to them and respond to their implications for their family, school, and social lives.
Sitting down, talking, discussing things together, exchanging opinions, and explaining with real-life examples all contribute, along with other things that families can do, to helping children understand what’s happening and deal with it positively as it happens, preparing them smoothly for success in the future.
Providing Children’s Daily Material Needs
Children’s material needs, such as food, drink, air, clothing, shelter, rest, and entertainment, constitute the most basic daily needs and play a crucial role in determining their innate physical survival.
Failure to provide these needs in the types and quantities sufficient to sustain and maintain the body, firstly, undermines the physical vitality and general health of children, making them vulnerable to illness and disease. This is then considered a major fundamental failure on the part of both parents, for a simple, logical reason: current material needs embody the necessary means for their survival or survival. They also form the basis for all the following needs: psychological, security, social, cognitive, behavioral, practical, self-realization, and adherence to the constitutions of the environment and belonging to its identity, philosophy, and human civilization.
If children lack the nourishment of their physical needs, they will necessarily lack the ability to progress in fulfilling other developmental needs, as many studies specializing in the needs and fields of human development indicate.
While the father is expected to fulfill the responsibilities of providing for the children’s material needs, the mother, in the absence or loss of the father, bears the economic and moral burden of meeting these needs.
However, the issue of these needs is not limited to the children’s overabundance of food. This overabundance, in most psychological and biological cases, is harmful to the children’s health, just as it is when they are deprived of them due to poverty, rejection, neglect, or excessive stinginess on the part of the family, as we explained in a previous parental approach. Moderation in providing children with material needs—in terms of quality, quantity, quality, and timing—are critical criteria for successful parenting and for the children’s healthy development.
To successfully and effectively fulfill the responsibilities of both fathers and mothers in providing their children’s daily material needs, the following principles can be observed:
1. Provide children’s material needs according to their actual current circumstances, in terms of quality, quantity, quality, and timing, without excess or deficiency, or by delaying or advancing them.
2. Psychological and social balance in providing material needs. Parents should not be overly busy outside the family, with their own bitter palms, to provide for these needs at the expense of their family time, to interact with, supervise, and guide their children. Children’s psychosocial needs and regular behavioral monitoring by the father and mother are just as important for their health as their material needs.
3. Planning for the future within the family’s available resources. Parents should not limit themselves to providing for their children’s material needs, as the popular saying goes: “Spend what you have in your pocket, and what is unseen will come to you.” Rather, it is more beneficial and safer for the family’s and children’s health over time for parents to organize their family’s financing based on a regular income and the need to protect against future emergencies. This means a carefully considered, objective distribution of income is required to meet present needs and secure future needs, in the event of an unexpected emergency due to a cutoff or shortage of this financial income.
4. Educating and training children on financial management skills for the daily, weekly, or monthly allowances they receive from their family. In this context, parents may do the following:
* Discuss the principles and methods of wise daily spending and saving as much of their personal allowance as possible for future needs.
* Assign children additional family chores (not essential to daily family life or their daily duties) in exchange for a financial reward that can be used to provide for their important needs and set aside a portion for the future.
* Reward children whenever they appropriately spend their allowance and save a portion of it. The current author/researcher, while training children on financial saving and rewarding this approach, rewarded each daughter monthly with an amount equal to the amount of savings she had made.
* Avoid compensating children for mismanaging their allowance, spending, or use of their possessions.
* Encourage children to invest, negotiate financially, and buy and sell. Take them to markets and shopping, and assign them tasks to buy and sell items through guidance, direction, and regular follow-up from the family.
Providing children with opportunities to explore and learn from the environment
Providing families with realistic field opportunities for children to visit, study, and learn from various environmental sites is beneficial for their upbringing in the following areas:
1. Developing and enriching their academic knowledge related to these environmental sites.
2. Consolidating a sense of national identity, pride in social heritage, and general cultural belonging.
3. Bridging the psychological gap between generations and enhancing children’s self-confidence and self-esteem. Families taking children on field visits to museums, exhibitions, social, educational, health, public service, natural, geographical, and economic sites, and other sites, or providing the facilities and fees for visits within peer groups and school activities within this framework, are effective means of developing children’s awareness, knowledge, interests, and skills as required.