Positive Parenting: Experts Talk About Good Parenting

The aim of modern parenting is to transform a child into a happy and responsible adult. Parenting experts advise parents, however, that this is a wrong view of parenting. Instead they must focus on cultivating the physical, intellectual, emotional and social abilities of their kids.

Happiness is a worthy goal, as per Annette Michaux, director of the Parenting Research Centre. The danger, nonetheless, is that it tends to flatten out all the other aspects of parenting that are very important, she added.

The term "parenting", according to Merriam - Webster Dictionary, appeared in America in 1958 and by 1970s it became very common. In the past, people use this term to define what parents really do. Fast forward today, though, the term "parenting" is used to describe what parents must do.

The ways of contemporary parenting are all centered on ensuring outcomes, promoting specific behaviors, and teaching lessons which will produce a certain type of kid who becomes a polite, happy, financially stable, and office trained individual. This is according to a post in the BigThink. Unluckily, this particular parenting perspective is "fundamentally misguided" according to Dr. Alison Gopnik.

So what makes a good parent? The experts have spoken.

To be a parent is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love, not to make a certain sort of thing, Gopnik told the The Irish Times. She said that rather than being a carpenter who seeks to produce a certain kind of individual, raising kids is more likely nurturing and protecting a garden.

The basics for good parenting, according to Amy Bohnert, a psychologist at Loyola University, are to nurture a warm, secure attachment with the kids so that they recognize that all their needs are going to be met as well as they got an area to go to whenever they need comfort.