Are we meeting their needs?

Something that I have always found fascinating is the affect parents have on their children, but what I have found even more fascinating is the reasons behind parenting.

Why do we parent?

John Hopkins says the reason why we parent is to prepare our children to survive and thrive in the world that they will live in. Every good parent wants their child to have every possible chance of success and happiness in this world, but we are not all going to parent the same because we each perceive our environment in a different light. For my mom, her parents would let her go out and wander around the neighborhood, but my dad was punished pretty harshly if he strayed from home or if he talked back. Why is this? Where my dad’s parents just trying to control my dad. No, they were just simply preparing him for the world he was going to live in. You see, my dad was raised in Peru in the poor parts of Lima. Unlike the environment that my mom lived in, wandering around the neighborhood was dangerous and you needed strict obedience in order to survive and thrive there.

We parent to prepare and protect our children.

Even though we parent in many different ways, there are still some basic needs that all children need met. John Hopkins suggests 5 main needs.

When you think about needs, you probably think about the needs related to sleep, food, shelter, clothes, etc. When we talk about children’s development needs, it is completely different.

Here they are.

• Contact and Belonging: Every child needs to be touched in loving ways and feel that they are wanted and needed. There have been countless studies that show that babies who do not experience physical contact, develop malformations of the body and lack social skills. There was once a phenomenon that happened in a hospital. There were two wings that were close to identical, but one wing was suffering a significant amount of infant fatalities than the other. Nobody knew why. They tried deep cleaning the facility, switching staff, looking at ever possible difference but nothing changed. One night, a doctor has stayed later in the wings to finish up some work before going home, when he noticed a cleaning lady walking through the babies and just gently caressing them and talking to them. She occasionally would pick one up and then gently set them back down in their cribs. The doctor approached her and asked her how long she had been doing this. She replied, “for months now”. The doctor immediately had her switched to the other wing and the result was drastic. The wing that had less infant fatalities began to have more and the other wing that had been experiencing a significant number of infant fatalities, began to see less and less infants dying.

What does this tell us? Contact is vital. Parents should offer contact freely. If they do not, children may develop an undue attention seeking behavior, or in other words, doing things to get attention that may be annoying or potentially dangerous.

• Power: Children should be given an amount of power. Hopkins calls this Response-Ability, or the ability to respond. Parents should allow children to make choices and then let the consequence follow, good or bad. Children who are not given power have a tendency to be more rebellious or seek to control others.
• Protection: Every child deserves and needs to feel safe. That doesn’t mean that we fight their battles, but we give them a safe palace to come back too and to learn how to fight their battles.  The best thing a parent can do is to teach them how to be assertive and to forgive.  We can do this by creating situations where they are allowed to express their opinions and thoughts. We can ask them what they think of different matters and help them learn to express them in constructive ways. Children whose need of protection is not met will seek revenge.
• Withdrawal: Everyone needs to take a break sometimes and children should be allowed to take one as well. We need to help them recognize when a break is needed and when we need to come back to a task. Parent can do this in leading by example. If you two are working together, verbally say something like “we are going to take a 15min break” and then take it, and then come back. Children who do not learn to withdrawal may develop undue avoidance, meaning that they will isolate themselves.
• Challenge: Children need to be challenged and feel pride in overcoming their challenges. Parents should not try to ease the challenge if the child is fully capable of meeting it. If they do, children may develop avoidance to challenges.

When we meet these needs, we better prepare our children for the world that they will be living in.