The Importance Of Family Stability On The Growth Of Children

As a child, I always found myself feeling partly guilty when my parents would fight or yell at each other over small issues like who was going to take me to my basketball practice. I know now that, while I was the center of that one issue, overall it was not my fault in the grand scheme of things. However many of the anxiety derives from those past days of me sitting in my closet trying to avoid the fallout. Being one of four children, not the best behaved children mind you, my parents did not have the easiest time raising us. We were never beaten or anything extreme, but we definitely experienced our fair share of punishments that were sometimes a bit extreme. One that comes to mind was picking up pebbles in our backyard, which there were thousands, for hours and putting them in buckets. Needless to say, my family life as a child never felt stable or secure. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best times were spent with my family during my childhood, but at the same time I always told myself I would create a more stable family life for my child or children.

Studies from whether or not spanking works to the effect of chores on a child have been done over and over again to explain what creates a healthy productive member of society. With each experiment with a positive outcome, there is always a factor that stands out amongst the rest. Its not wealth or status of the family, but rather the stability and structure within the house. Even families who were poor, that had structure and fostered healthy relationships between parents many times lead to a more successful and productive member of society. Children shouldn’t be commoditized, but there is a great lesson to be learned for future generations of parents by studying them in masse. The happier and healthier our children grow up , the more our society benefits.

That being said I want to go over a few things I told myself I would never do whenever I bring a child into this world. Although it very much takes two parties in any relationship to make it work, I am hoping that my significant other will be supportive in how I wish to run our household. Even if my childhood had some rough situations compared to others, I would say it could have been worse and I am a product of that childhood so its hard to think about changing my upbringing. However, most of the rules I want to put in place for myself and my partner as parents are direct opposites from what I experienced as a child. To begin, under no situation will we argue or talk about problems in front of our children until they are of age to understand things. My parents would often argue about money and divorce in front of us, which made me often feel very unsecure in our house. My mother would often talk about extremes and say things like “were going to be homeless” which was very far from the truth, but to me as a young child, I didn’t understand.

Next I want to be open and involved with my child’s life and make him feel like he can talk to me about anything. This was something that my parents actually did do right, however I never really took them up on the offer most times. It was just my personality, but I tended to keep my struggles internal and blame myself if something was wrong. Another thing I want to do is when my children come of age around 15ish, I want to start treating them like adults not children any longer, while still proving the previous ideologies at this time, I want them to form their own ideas and offer them information on the world. One of the most important lessons I ever had in my life was when my father gave me $500 to play around on the stock market with. This inspired my interest in finance and helped me delve into understanding how the world and especially how money works. While I did invest in many penny stocks and lose a large majority of the money, I learned priceless amounts of information. I think many children are sheltered until they go off to college and are not able to function without their parents, which is why I want to prepare my child for the world.

Finally I want to allow wiggle room for little structure and give my child room to explore, make stupid wrong decisions so he may learn from them. I am a big believer that if I create a base layer of good morals and values at a young age and provide structure that eventually it will no longer be needed as heavily. Children and young adults need room to grow and learn about themselves in an environment without their parents which is what I aim to give them at a certain age. I know this will be hard to do for me emotionally at that point, but I believe it is essential in growth for a child. The amount I have learned and experienced from the internet and other places of little structure has made me realize the person I am today.

I am feeling a bit nostalgic after the house I grew up in and spent my entire youth in is going up for sale and I will be moving on with my own life, which has me thinking about the future. My parents are long divorced and I am mostly independent today, other than financially having help from them for college related expenses. Thinking about it, I would say that I actually had a relatively good childhood in the grand scheme of things, which is exactly what I want to give my own child in the future. I grew into someone that has many flaws, but overall I do love myself. A parent only wants one thing for his child, which is to give him a better life than what they had and that is my main goal.