Parents are the best people to have a positive impact on the lives of their children. If they want, they can mould the lives of their children in a beautiful and positive way. But for this they will have to put in some effort and will have to make some changes in their own lives.
Children want to be like their parents. This is a known fact. If parents are doctors and lawyers, then their children also want to be doctors and lawyers. So if you want your children to be good and mature human beings, all you have to do is be one yourself. Children look up to their parents as their heroes. Parents show their children the way and path to follow in life, and children follow them.
Usually children would do anything to please their parents and parents can use this to their advantage. Here it is of utmost importance that the parents spend a huge quantity of their time with their children. Children like that. Because the further apart you go from them the lesser you understand them, and harder it is for you to guide them and help them in their lives. Children always know when their parents are not spending time with them, and this always has a negative effect on their lives. Especially in this age of long working hours, television and internet, parents should make sure they spend quality time with their children.
Children emulate their parents' behavior. If the parents have good habits and personal attitudes toward life, then their children emulate them and become like them. If you do not want your children to drink alcohol then you must be a non-drinker yourself. They will copy that. If you want your children to be safe car drivers and keep them away from harms way. Then you must ensure that you drive very safely yourself. If you spend your time and energy in supporting philanthropic work and projects, chances are they will be philanthropists themselves and will be a positive force in serving society.
Can we really understand what the child wants to be; and how can we help and support them to become mature and responsible human beings? Well we can. This takes effort, patience and most importantly time. A parent must be wholly involved in the child's life, not in an annoying and irritating manner, snooping around their rooms, but in a positive and understanding way. You must become their best friends and confidants, understanding their minds and helping them in their journey towards achieving their goals, making them good and successful individuals.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sanjay_Kak
Monday, September 28, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
4 Tips on Teaching Children the Dangers of Strangers
In today's world teaching our children the dangers of befriending strangers it's essential for parents to teach children why it's important to avoid strangers as well as teaching them how to react if they encounter a dangerous situation.
Tip #1: Educate Your Children about the Dangers of Strangers
The first thing you need to do is talk with your children providing as much information as possible about the dangers of stranger contact. Explain as much as possible about staying away from any adults they do not know while focusing your discussion on their the amount of information they are able to understand. Provide safety tips and guidelines and insist they follow them at all times.
Tip #2: Provide rules and guidelines when your children are home alone
Whenever your children are home without an adult it's essential for them to know never to tell a stranger they are home by themselves. If you are able to do so set your answering machine so it will pick up the phone on the first ring or turn the ringer off completely so your child will not attempt to answer the phone. Teach them to never tell a stranger the parents are not home but simply they are unable to come to the phone at the moment.
Lock the house whenever you leave and make sure the children understand not to open the door for anyone. Develop a plan of escape in case anyone ringing the doorbell attempts to break in or just refuses to go away. Make sure they understand how to call 911 to let the police know they are in danger and to immediately leave the house if a stranger breaks in.
Tip #3: Teach your child about public awareness
When you are in a public place with your children make sure they are always by your side. The most effective way to accomplish this is to hold your child's hand and make sure you are there at all times. A baby or toddler is safest in a stroller where the parent can watch him or her at all times-do not turn your back on them for even a second.
Always have a recent photo of your children in case something happens. That will allow you to provide security and law enforcement officers with an accurate view of your child instead of you taking the time to provide a description. Make an eff0rt to remember what your children were wearing to help authorities find them quicker.
Teach your older children the importance of being wary of strangers. Predators may attempt to lure a child with candy or under the pretense of needing help. They may even tell the child they are a friend of the parent or the parent sent them. Make sure they understand it is never safe to take anything from someone they don't know and that you would never send someone to pick them up unless it was a relative or adult friend they knew. Teach them they are never to get into a car with anyone other than a parent or trusted adult.
Tip #4: Online crime prevention
With so many criminals lurking online it's important for your children to understand they should never give out a phone number or agree to meet any strangers they have talked to online. Pedophiles lurk on the Internet and often lie about their age and identity in order to con children into providing personal information such as an address or convincing them to meet somewhere. This could subject your child to abduction, assault and sexual abuse so make sure your children understand the dangers of chatting with people they don't know.
We have made crime prevention our business for over 12 years now. We have learned a lot of practical safety tips and make a point of sharing our knowledge with our supporters. In providing non-lethal self defense weapons online, we have been asked just about every self defense and safety question in the book. We enjoy sharing what we know about protecting your family and keeping kids safe.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rebecca_M._Jacobs
Read more...
Tip #1: Educate Your Children about the Dangers of Strangers
The first thing you need to do is talk with your children providing as much information as possible about the dangers of stranger contact. Explain as much as possible about staying away from any adults they do not know while focusing your discussion on their the amount of information they are able to understand. Provide safety tips and guidelines and insist they follow them at all times.
Tip #2: Provide rules and guidelines when your children are home alone
Whenever your children are home without an adult it's essential for them to know never to tell a stranger they are home by themselves. If you are able to do so set your answering machine so it will pick up the phone on the first ring or turn the ringer off completely so your child will not attempt to answer the phone. Teach them to never tell a stranger the parents are not home but simply they are unable to come to the phone at the moment.
Lock the house whenever you leave and make sure the children understand not to open the door for anyone. Develop a plan of escape in case anyone ringing the doorbell attempts to break in or just refuses to go away. Make sure they understand how to call 911 to let the police know they are in danger and to immediately leave the house if a stranger breaks in.
Tip #3: Teach your child about public awareness
When you are in a public place with your children make sure they are always by your side. The most effective way to accomplish this is to hold your child's hand and make sure you are there at all times. A baby or toddler is safest in a stroller where the parent can watch him or her at all times-do not turn your back on them for even a second.
Always have a recent photo of your children in case something happens. That will allow you to provide security and law enforcement officers with an accurate view of your child instead of you taking the time to provide a description. Make an eff0rt to remember what your children were wearing to help authorities find them quicker.
Teach your older children the importance of being wary of strangers. Predators may attempt to lure a child with candy or under the pretense of needing help. They may even tell the child they are a friend of the parent or the parent sent them. Make sure they understand it is never safe to take anything from someone they don't know and that you would never send someone to pick them up unless it was a relative or adult friend they knew. Teach them they are never to get into a car with anyone other than a parent or trusted adult.
Tip #4: Online crime prevention
With so many criminals lurking online it's important for your children to understand they should never give out a phone number or agree to meet any strangers they have talked to online. Pedophiles lurk on the Internet and often lie about their age and identity in order to con children into providing personal information such as an address or convincing them to meet somewhere. This could subject your child to abduction, assault and sexual abuse so make sure your children understand the dangers of chatting with people they don't know.
We have made crime prevention our business for over 12 years now. We have learned a lot of practical safety tips and make a point of sharing our knowledge with our supporters. In providing non-lethal self defense weapons online, we have been asked just about every self defense and safety question in the book. We enjoy sharing what we know about protecting your family and keeping kids safe.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rebecca_M._Jacobs
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Parent Vs Person
To be a parent is to be, not only a person, but also an icon. To be an icon means to become a public person, meaning who we are belongs not just to us, but to others as well-particularly our children. Our iconographic identity is created, not just by us, but also by our offspring. We may want to be known as great parents, but only our children can verify that.
As children of parents we want to believe in what they did for us so much, that we will vigorously pretend it was wonderful, for both of our sakes, even when it was the reverse. But whatever the truth may be, its meaning requires the input of both parents and children. That's the nature of an iconographic-public-relationship.
We humans believe vigorously both in making people into icons, and into becoming one our self. Success and fame are both measured, and rewarded, by our ability to become known in public ways. It gives us something to say, a sense of entitlement about each other, defining who and what we are. As icons, others partly belong to us, and we to them. It also makes them, and us, known by more than just our intimates.
Icons include parents, actors, politicians, priests, judges, police, representatives, business people, profiteers, criminals, etc., etc. All public identities make an icon of us. Indeed we believe and understand more about each other as icons, than we do as just one person to another. We trust iconographic identities more easily, because it's hard to get to know each other, and to trust our judgments about each other without public proofs.
What's more, education exists to verify the expertness of our iconographic identity, even more than it exists to educate us to have a mind of our own. Indeed that aspect of going to school has been almost discarded in present day; education has become almost exclusively training for a profession or trade. What classical education used to represent-becoming an enlightened individuated person capable of very independent thinking-has fallen into limbo. Perhaps because we no longer know how to conceptualize it, we're so preoccupied with verifying competence in an age defined by relativity-the loss of certainty.
In sharp contrast, there is one aspect of learning about which we are very sure-a child's right to form an independent sense of their personal identity. We've finally begun to give, in spades, this valuable opportunity to our children, though we haven't learned to give it to ourselves with such vigorous support. But that's probably only a matter of time, though nothing's any longer for certain.
In the meantime we adults must continue living primarily in a public world in which icons are more dominant than the individuality of specific people. Though we don't admit it, we prefer it that way. Even in our intimate circles, including our families, everyone is icono-graphized. We are parents, wives, husbands, lovers far more prominently than we are individual people. We most often perceive these shared roles as personally determined. But they are not defined just by us; they're also defined by the people with whom we have these public relationships. In effect, public means not to be alone; though being alone is the only vivid way to experience one's self.
Family has not traditionally been perceived as a public place, nor is intimacy a public event. But they are. That's what reputation is all about, defining how we're known by others, an issue that is usually one of our most important and vulnerable concerns; how are people listening and interpreting what we do or are with them? That includes our reputation with our spouse, both positive and negative parts of which may or may not be justified if the internal truth about every individual is known with vivid clarity. Everyone in a divorce makes the claim that they are being unfairly described.
Thus, as we try and teach our children nowadays, only inside of each one of us can we seek to define our identity in our own unique, and exclusive way. So we vigorously encourage them to think and act for themselves.
So where are we going with all of this? That as parents we have no right to claim righteousness about how we functioned as caretakers without first consulting the unconscious of our children. We can't trust their conscious mind, because we may have-probably did-unwittingly for sure, teach them to lie about what really happened when we had lapses of parenting skill of one kind or another. Losing it is what we usually call it, thinking children will recover from its ill effects. When instead, because such lapses always repeat themselves, children make the laws of their life out of such experience. In the sense of avoiding things their parents can't handle, even if it means giving up huge portions of their own identity by this partial self-burial. So lets not pretend we have no negative effects upon our children, most of which we know nothing about.
All psychic symptoms of dysfunction have this collaboration of fabricating the truth, put there in order to protect comfort, stability and the status quo of our parental assumptions about how to raise kids. All of these with time and progress will be judged as partly erroneous; such is the inevitable fate relativity has thrust us into.
In our child-centered society, there is a vigorous effort to deny that we ever make mistakes as parents. We try and pretend that psychic distress can be easily educated out, that it's just a hormonal or biochemical imbalance, that science has given us easy steps to slice symptoms out of a person's life. When, after such superficial treatment, next year the symptoms will be right back where they started. Fathoming the problems and distress of human experience requires far more effort and accomplishment, over aspects of experience that cannot be controlled-just influenced over time with great effort. So it is with anything human wrought. Nature didn't make growing up a few easy steps, or living life a piece of cake. So what makes us think we can change our self just by applying the right kind of short-term objectivity?
We seem to feel safer living in an iconographic reality. Some people call it religion. But it's more functional to call relating to each other as symbols, iconographic; it includes all the ways in which we do it, not just with God, but also with each other. Somehow these larger than life definitions of who we are, appears to make everything more valid and believable. We don't very well understand, or entirely trust, each other, or ourselves, as individuals.
What's our favorite antidote to this uncertainty? Be famous, making one's self somebody big, even if we're really small, and need somebody else's dialogue to make us real. Hollywood and Washington DC are full of such people.
It's as parents that we feel the biggest sense of liability in being icons, because all of us make mistakes. Nobody's got it right yet, and most likely never will. Perfection is a delusional concept, born out of a desperate and fearful need to feel justified in our lifetime. Yet imperfection is nature's way. But if in understanding all of this as parents, we have to experience the criticism or shame of our caretaking lapses, it's another question. We need respite from a steady diet that painful.
There is only one way for us, as beleaguered parents, to restore our reputation. That is to insist that we are two very distinct people-a parent, and an individual; and each identity must be conceptualized separately. It's only fair. To be judged in life by only the way we parented, denies any legitimacy to our life as an individual. A great many of my patients have been gifted people, whose parents were equally talented-as individuals. But as the parents of my patients, many of them were rotten! Mostly it's not their fault because they had no psychology, no sense of who a child is. We're just beginning to get that now. But in all truthfulness, they were terrible parents. Their appropriately angry children would call them abusive neglectful bastards.
But to address them exclusively in that way trashes what is a basically decent, even exemplary life. That is at least for those who regard other non-family achievements as equal to parenting. Some don't.
The problem is we're not used to regarding someone in more than one way, as both very individual as well as iconographic. We jumble it all together in the same bag, letting our preferences and prejudices determine how we interpret the mix, instead of giving each other our due-a better chance for respect from others, even if we weren't such great parents.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Don_Fenn
Read more...
As children of parents we want to believe in what they did for us so much, that we will vigorously pretend it was wonderful, for both of our sakes, even when it was the reverse. But whatever the truth may be, its meaning requires the input of both parents and children. That's the nature of an iconographic-public-relationship.
We humans believe vigorously both in making people into icons, and into becoming one our self. Success and fame are both measured, and rewarded, by our ability to become known in public ways. It gives us something to say, a sense of entitlement about each other, defining who and what we are. As icons, others partly belong to us, and we to them. It also makes them, and us, known by more than just our intimates.
Icons include parents, actors, politicians, priests, judges, police, representatives, business people, profiteers, criminals, etc., etc. All public identities make an icon of us. Indeed we believe and understand more about each other as icons, than we do as just one person to another. We trust iconographic identities more easily, because it's hard to get to know each other, and to trust our judgments about each other without public proofs.
What's more, education exists to verify the expertness of our iconographic identity, even more than it exists to educate us to have a mind of our own. Indeed that aspect of going to school has been almost discarded in present day; education has become almost exclusively training for a profession or trade. What classical education used to represent-becoming an enlightened individuated person capable of very independent thinking-has fallen into limbo. Perhaps because we no longer know how to conceptualize it, we're so preoccupied with verifying competence in an age defined by relativity-the loss of certainty.
In sharp contrast, there is one aspect of learning about which we are very sure-a child's right to form an independent sense of their personal identity. We've finally begun to give, in spades, this valuable opportunity to our children, though we haven't learned to give it to ourselves with such vigorous support. But that's probably only a matter of time, though nothing's any longer for certain.
In the meantime we adults must continue living primarily in a public world in which icons are more dominant than the individuality of specific people. Though we don't admit it, we prefer it that way. Even in our intimate circles, including our families, everyone is icono-graphized. We are parents, wives, husbands, lovers far more prominently than we are individual people. We most often perceive these shared roles as personally determined. But they are not defined just by us; they're also defined by the people with whom we have these public relationships. In effect, public means not to be alone; though being alone is the only vivid way to experience one's self.
Family has not traditionally been perceived as a public place, nor is intimacy a public event. But they are. That's what reputation is all about, defining how we're known by others, an issue that is usually one of our most important and vulnerable concerns; how are people listening and interpreting what we do or are with them? That includes our reputation with our spouse, both positive and negative parts of which may or may not be justified if the internal truth about every individual is known with vivid clarity. Everyone in a divorce makes the claim that they are being unfairly described.
Thus, as we try and teach our children nowadays, only inside of each one of us can we seek to define our identity in our own unique, and exclusive way. So we vigorously encourage them to think and act for themselves.
So where are we going with all of this? That as parents we have no right to claim righteousness about how we functioned as caretakers without first consulting the unconscious of our children. We can't trust their conscious mind, because we may have-probably did-unwittingly for sure, teach them to lie about what really happened when we had lapses of parenting skill of one kind or another. Losing it is what we usually call it, thinking children will recover from its ill effects. When instead, because such lapses always repeat themselves, children make the laws of their life out of such experience. In the sense of avoiding things their parents can't handle, even if it means giving up huge portions of their own identity by this partial self-burial. So lets not pretend we have no negative effects upon our children, most of which we know nothing about.
All psychic symptoms of dysfunction have this collaboration of fabricating the truth, put there in order to protect comfort, stability and the status quo of our parental assumptions about how to raise kids. All of these with time and progress will be judged as partly erroneous; such is the inevitable fate relativity has thrust us into.
In our child-centered society, there is a vigorous effort to deny that we ever make mistakes as parents. We try and pretend that psychic distress can be easily educated out, that it's just a hormonal or biochemical imbalance, that science has given us easy steps to slice symptoms out of a person's life. When, after such superficial treatment, next year the symptoms will be right back where they started. Fathoming the problems and distress of human experience requires far more effort and accomplishment, over aspects of experience that cannot be controlled-just influenced over time with great effort. So it is with anything human wrought. Nature didn't make growing up a few easy steps, or living life a piece of cake. So what makes us think we can change our self just by applying the right kind of short-term objectivity?
We seem to feel safer living in an iconographic reality. Some people call it religion. But it's more functional to call relating to each other as symbols, iconographic; it includes all the ways in which we do it, not just with God, but also with each other. Somehow these larger than life definitions of who we are, appears to make everything more valid and believable. We don't very well understand, or entirely trust, each other, or ourselves, as individuals.
What's our favorite antidote to this uncertainty? Be famous, making one's self somebody big, even if we're really small, and need somebody else's dialogue to make us real. Hollywood and Washington DC are full of such people.
It's as parents that we feel the biggest sense of liability in being icons, because all of us make mistakes. Nobody's got it right yet, and most likely never will. Perfection is a delusional concept, born out of a desperate and fearful need to feel justified in our lifetime. Yet imperfection is nature's way. But if in understanding all of this as parents, we have to experience the criticism or shame of our caretaking lapses, it's another question. We need respite from a steady diet that painful.
There is only one way for us, as beleaguered parents, to restore our reputation. That is to insist that we are two very distinct people-a parent, and an individual; and each identity must be conceptualized separately. It's only fair. To be judged in life by only the way we parented, denies any legitimacy to our life as an individual. A great many of my patients have been gifted people, whose parents were equally talented-as individuals. But as the parents of my patients, many of them were rotten! Mostly it's not their fault because they had no psychology, no sense of who a child is. We're just beginning to get that now. But in all truthfulness, they were terrible parents. Their appropriately angry children would call them abusive neglectful bastards.
But to address them exclusively in that way trashes what is a basically decent, even exemplary life. That is at least for those who regard other non-family achievements as equal to parenting. Some don't.
The problem is we're not used to regarding someone in more than one way, as both very individual as well as iconographic. We jumble it all together in the same bag, letting our preferences and prejudices determine how we interpret the mix, instead of giving each other our due-a better chance for respect from others, even if we weren't such great parents.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Don_Fenn
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