Parenting is the most important and serious responsibility a father and/or mother undertakes toward themselves, their family, their children, and society. If this parenting responsibilities are successful, then the father, mother, children, family, and society will be safe—successful and healthy in their personalities, goals, and behavior, both now and in the future.
Families may be disrupted by the death or absence of one of the parents (the father or mother) due to various known and unavoidable circumstances. The greater responsibilities of parenting fall on the remaining parent: the father or mother. This increases the burdens and, sometimes, the endless suffering of the father or mother.
Whenever the family faces this exceptional situation in the family environment, the only option left for the father or mother is to re-evaluate, organize, and direct their parental responsibilities. They must devote time and effort, not just to the bare minimum or the general average expected of them, but rather to dedicate themselves and their care, doubling their efforts and time to compensate for the absence of their father or mother psychologically, socially, and financially, in the hope of having healthy, purposeful children, families, and roles for them in adulthood. The most important principles and responsibilities that can be considered by both fathers and mothers, regardless of their circumstances, to achieve successful parenting for their children are presented in the following explanations:
General Principles Considered by Fathers and Mothers in Successful Parenting
The parental approach to their children is expected to be respectful, justified, and logical, helping them feel valued and free from the need to escape into mischievous circles, drug use, and sometimes transgression. This encourages the desired psychosocial harmony in them. To this end, we present the following procedural principles:
1. The appropriate timing for directing, guiding, or holding children accountable.
2- Guidance and direction through behavior and action, not words. That is, by carrying out what is required of the children without continuing to wish, hope, or talk about what they would do well.
3- Providing opportunities for children to participate in daily family decisions and requirements, such as shopping, discussing some (normal, of course) issues that concern the family or arise in their lives, and performing household chores such as cleaning, organizing, cooking, answering the phone/fax, the parent’s home office, and taking care of the computer and its accessories.
4- Avoid doing anything that the children can do, even if they neglected, forgot, or made mistakes. Let the children experience the results of their decisions and behavioral choices and correct what is required based on these results.
5- Avoiding conflicts and emotional reactions to children’s poor judgment or mistakes toward their parents. Containing anger and conflict and temporarily withdrawing from the situation gives children the opportunity to rethink and evaluate their actions, and then return to the parents to apologize or offer appropriate consideration.
Also, try to avoid conflict with your children by doing one or more of the following to release their physical and mental energies:
* Provide ongoing opportunities for children to think, be active, and make decisions. If the weather conditions do not allow or hinder outdoor activities, parents should seek alternatives within the family environment at home.
* Maintain children’s interest, curiosity, and behavioral engagement by diversifying the opportunities and activities available to them from day to day and from one occasion to another.
* Invest children’s activities, time, and interventions in learning (knowledge, values, skills, and norms) to continually help build their desired psychosocial adjustment to the environment. Even if children disagree among themselves during play or an activity, they should be tasked with resolving their disputes by agreeing (in writing) on mutually acceptable rules to overcome the conflict. If they make a mistake, they should be asked to examine the observed results, reconsider their decisions and behavior, and find more effective alternatives to their positions.
* Study the family environment and remove the stimuli (factors) that upset children and motivate them to engage in behavioral violations, hostility, or resort to conflict in their interactions with each other and with their parents. Establishing routines, schedules, and rules known to them regarding what they can or are expected to do is important in this context.
* Train children in the skills, values, and knowledge required for their behavioral well-being and to overcome their mistakes and conflicts. Teach them, whenever appropriate, how to overcome psychological difficulties (such as anger, feelings of hurt, and injustice).
6- Give parents unconditional love to their children by overlooking the nature and consequences of their behavior. It is always necessary to distinguish between loving children and making them feel valued within the family and not tolerating their behavioral mistakes.
7- Use logic when holding children accountable for the results of their work. Linking the type and degree of this accountability to the nature of the results reinforced by their inappropriate behaviors helps them relearn the required skills. If they neglect or do not implement what is expected of them, then they should not be deprived or neglected completely from family attention. Rather, they should be fined a portion of their weekly allowance, for example, or assigned the same work twice in a row.
8. Use both kindness and firmness when dealing with children, fulfilling their duties, and securing their agreed-upon or deserved rights.
9. Parents’ practice of rationality and providing freedom of personal and professional choice, allowing them to become what they desire or are capable of in the future, without trying to turn them into carbon copies of themselves, are all crucial to their ability to adapt to the social and psychological environments in which they live or work.
In this context, try to consider the following:
* Respect children’s choices regarding their personal lifestyle choices that are appropriate for each of them.
* Respect the purposes children intend for their behavior, and correct these purposes and behavior whenever necessary. The primary purpose of children’s behavior, whether positive or negative, is belonging to the family and the environment.
While normal children engage in cooperative and collaborative behaviors, accept instructions or family wishes, and fulfill their aspirations for future advancement, achieving, through positive means, the desired sense of belonging: a sense of essential and active membership in the family and the attention and appreciation of their parents for this membership.
However, when they are dissatisfied with what is happening in the family, they express themselves in negative ways, such as mischief, excessive or inappropriate requests, stubbornness, and disobedience to family instructions and wishes. This is to gain the family’s attention and sense of belonging to their children. Their belonging to their family is necessarily achieved by being the most annoying or offensive they can be (i.e., achieving belonging through behavioral misbehavior).
In such abnormal cases, parents seek to understand their children, their true intentions and behavioral needs, and encourage them to reflect, balance situations and issues, and adopt the best alternatives in each case.
10. Maintaining harmony (non-contradiction) with serious follow-up in dealing with their children and in responding to their wishes or needs. If a parent says “no” to a child regarding a specific task or action, they must not back down, no matter how much they wish, plead, or cry, so that the son or daughter learns to respect the “principle” of human interaction.
11. Give children a grace period to complete their duties or instructions, even for a few minutes, as sometimes necessary, to give them the cognitive readiness to act in a manner that meets the requirements of psychosocial adjustment with the environment.
12. Provide opportunities for children to compensate for behavioral shortcomings or errors in psychosocial adjustment with the environment as an educational alternative to punishment, beating, or sometimes violence.
13. Provide children with behavioral options to review and balance their actions and choose more effectively to ensure their psychosocial adjustment with the demands of the civil society in which they live.