If you conducted a survey asking people what are the criteria that makes for a wise and successful parent, you would probably get a varied answer. It is understandable as even child experts have different views in this matter. Hence, you will find in this article all the necessary requisites to make a wise and successful parent.

Read through the list and see whether you meet all the criteria. Don’t worry if you don’t as this gives you the opportunity to improve on your parenting skills.

The wise, good, successful and superb parent fulfills the following criteria:

• Able to provide a nurturing and happy environment for your children to grow (a stable home).

It is a fact that children from a stable home will grow up to be productive and conscientious adults.

• Able to provide the necessities in life (material needs), i.e. food, shelter and clothing.

A certain comfortable level of needs must be met to ensure proper growth and development.

• Able to provide advice, emotional support, guidance and unconditional love among other things.

Children with all their emotional needs being met are conditioned to become better adults. Children who grew up in a loving environment becomes a loving person.

• Able to provide safety, structure and protection.

During the growing-up years, children need to feel protected, safe and secure. They need to feel some solid family structure in their lives that they can depend on as they go through childhood anxieties.

• Able to provide proper rules to introduce discipline and responsibility.

Children need to learn abut rules, about limitations and what is right or wrong. These valuable experiences will teach them to be a discipline and responsible adult. Rules are made to curb them from doing bad things and at the same time, they learn about taking responsibility for their actions.

• Able to provide unlimited opportunities for their children to learn and make mistakes and learn back from those mistakes.

Opportunities should be given or created to improve their social skills, leadership skills, discipline and self-control. Children learn things from the home, the school, their environment and most importantly from their own unique life experiences. The more situation or opportunities they encounter, the more valuable experiences they will gather. It can be good or bad experience. They learn what life is all about and this builds up their character.

• Able to provide opportunities for their children to be who they are and does not force their own expectations on them.

Children need to be allowed to be who they are and feel loved for it. They should not feel pressured to conform to their parent’s expectations.

• Able to provide quality time to be spent with the children, talking and listening and doing things together.

Parents must get close to their children by spending time and doing things together. Parents who spent quality time with their children will form stronger bonds compared to those who don’t.

• Able to provide spiritual and moral guidance.

Children who were brought up with a strong spiritual background and good moral guidance are more likely to grow to be a virtuous person.

• Able to provide encouragement and give praise when necessary.

Your children will face a lot of challenges and disappointments while growing up. As a parent, you can give your support, encouragement and praise at appropriate times. Your children will learn to pick themselves up and move on in adverse situations.

Be a good role model

The above criteria are all essential. However, most importantly do not forget to provide a good example or role model to your children. Research has shown that parents who are responsible and hardworking tend to have children who are responsible and hardworking. Parents who are happy and easy-going tend to have children who are happy and easy-going.

On the flip side, parents who are short-tempered creates an unstable atmosphere at home which rubs off on their children. Parents who lack social skills will not be able to show and teach their children how to interact and relate with other people. Therefore, always keep in mind the influence you have on your children.

The parent’s reward

What is the end result of being a wise, good, successful and superb parent? The parent’s reward is in having children who are responsible, honest, mature, intelligent and dependable and having good emotional (high self-esteem) and social skills development. How many parents long for their children to have all these good qualities? I believe all parents want their children to possess all these good and excellent qualities.

Parents who have worked on their parenting skills and fulfill most of the criteria above shall no doubt have more confidence in their children. As parents, we never went to a parenting school and what we learn is mostly from the school of ‘hard-knocks’, learning from mistakes and experience. In addition, we also pick up things through observation and from our own childhood experience. You should realize that parenting is not an exact science and there is no a one-size-fits all formula for successful parenting.

In summary, my goal as a parent is the same as your goal and that is to provide a conducive growing up environment that enables the child to learn, make mistakes and make the most of herself. From the whole process, I hope that my child grows up to become a responsible mature adult.

Please share your ideas of what makes for a wise, good and successful parent. Your views and comments are most welcome.

photo credit: freeparking

The book ‘Know Your Parenting Personality’ by Janet Levine details nine personalities based on Enneagram (E-model) theory. The Greek word ‘ennea’ means ‘nine’ and ‘gram’ means ‘graph or model’.

Know Your Parenting Personality

Understanding these personalities can guide you to become a better parent. Some of the desired goals are to establish a strong connection with your child, to change self-defeating behavior patterns and to deepen the communication with your child.

The nine personalities explained in simple and straightforward language are:
1. The helper
2. The organizer
3. The dreamer
4. The observer
5. The questioner
6. The entertainer
7. The protector
8. The peacekeeper
9. The moralizer

My parenting personality

After going through the nine personalities, I identified myself to fall under ‘The observer’ parent. I learnt that my positive characteristics are the following:

• Rationality
• Calmness and balance
• Objectivity
• Creative synthesizing of ideas
• Big picture thinking
• Predictability
• Non-judging
• Restraint

The negatives of being an ‘Observer’ parent are:

• Requires privacy, guards time and energy
• Draws back from personal interactions
• Secrecy, overvalues independence
• Prefers non-engagement in emotions
• Tendency to be minimalistic in the physical world
• Lacks spontaneity, emphasizes controlling emotions
• Overvalues the self, takes a detached, observing stance
• Compartmentalizes, keeps family, work, other areas of life separate
• Non-communicative, interactions can be problematic

The book also describes strategies to overcome the shortcomings of each personality. For myself, I need to take the following actions:

1. Show my emotions
2. Practice role-model spontaneity for the children
3. Trust myself to do the right thing
4. Allocate more time to handle conflict
5. Put more effort to share myself with my family
6. Be more aware of my needs for energy management
7. Manage my big-picture thinking
8. Practice social skills

Once you have finished the book, you would have gained the essential knowledge about your personality type and have a deeper understanding on your parenting strategy. If you have patiently gone through the material, you would have a better sense of self-awareness that will help you to become a better parent.

If you have a strong desire and sense of purpose to improve your parenting skills then I recommend you to pick up the book as soon as possible and start on the journey for yourself.

Becoming good parents to your children is not easy. Most of the time we use methods that we learn from our own parents when we were young. We also apply knowledge that we pick up along the way or have read somewhere. Nobody said it was easy and most often than not, we learn through the whole parenting experience of what method works and does not work.

Ultimately though, parents have similar goals in what they expect from their children through their parenting skills. Parents hope for among other things, to have children who know responsibility, respect and compassion. Parents want their children to grow up to have good self-esteem about themselves, to be self-reliant, to be a good and helpful person, etc.

My own helpful tips for parents are:
1. Teach them to fish
2. Be a good role model
3. Respect your children

Teach them to fish

Teach your children about the idea of doing things by themselves to achieve or complete a task. Parents tend to complete a task or bow in to their children’s demands. If the parents do everything for their children, the children will come to expect this in every situation. Once your child has reached pre-school age (3 – 4 years old), they are old enough to understand instructions or requests. You can request them to do simple chores or tasks like putting back or arranging their toys, books, shoes, clothing, etc.

These will teach your children about responsibilities and being proud of themselves for being able to do something that the adults normally do. It will be easier for them as they grow up to accept more and more of life’s responsibilities.

Be a good role model

The person closest to the children is the parents. So be a good role model for them. Act the person that you would want them to be when they grow up. You may face some slip-ups from time to time but most of the time, play a good role and show a good example. From personal experience, it is a hard thing to do sometimes. We sometimes get home from work bringing all our problems and are certainly not in a good mind-frame to handle or listen to the children’s problem. Just remember that we are the parents and the children naturally turn to us to help them, to advice them or just to listen to them.

Respect your children

Children are very smart and catch-on very fast. They learn and pick-up a lot of things during their growing years. Starting at a young age, they start to show their individual, unique personality.

As parents we should give them room to grow, to make mistakes and not to expect perfection from them. Your expectations must be reasonable and agreeable to them. To expect more than they could give will put on unnecessary pressure on them and it will make them miserable and become rebellious.

Simply put, be flexible and constantly get their feedbacks. Become their friends or best buddies and they will always hold you in good regards.

The above are my tips to assist you in your parenting journey. You may have your own methods or tips to guide you in becoming successful parents but there is no harm to give mine a try.