Entry n 44: How to be a good parent

Being parents since the biginning of time has been the most important and marvellous thing in the life of any couple but it has been also quite difficult to do, especially with the growing up of the first child because parents learn as the practice.
As there has not been created yet a book or guidance to learn how to be a good parent, this role is a very complicated task for many people. Parents always try to do the best for their children, since they are babies and while they are growing until they become older enough to make their own decisions and to choose what they want to do with their lifes.
But as the process of growing up is very difficult for both, parents and children, sometimes wrong decisions are made and consequently the relationship between parents and children is broken, and then is when discussions and quarrels start to take place and this almost always occurs when children become teenagers.
The brake is produced mainly because teenagers are at a moment in their lifes in which they are looking for an identity. They are forming their personalities so that they are full of insecurities about themselves, they are always questioning what is wrong or right and they are always comfronting and questioning the adults` authority and the limits that they put on them.
Add to that, adults tend to confuse them by telling them “you are too young for this” or you are too adult for that”, so teens get more confused about themselves. There is also the tendency of trying to protect them of the dangers of the life outdoors by wrongly trying to keep them indoors as much as possible, or on the contrary, some parents think that by being friends of their children they are going to gain their trust and give them too much freedom.
I believe that this is also a mistake because at that age teenagers are not able to distinguish clearly what is wrong ans what is right, therefore they need the limits imposed by their parents to protect them of possible dangers or from making wrong decisions.
The main problem for parents at that moment is to keep a balance between putting limits and conquering their children`s trust, in order to take care of them and to maintain the relationship built when they were kids.
The extremes are problematics then, an advisable thing to do for parents is to try to understand this difficult process which adolescents go through, and acompain their children with the proper freedom that will be settled by parents by stablishing limits as clearly and fairly as possible, and trying to make them understand the reasons of these measures and the possible consequencies of not following their parents advices.
It is also clear that no matter how much parents put their best effort on protecting their children, if they want to do the wrong things nothing on earth is going to stop them, although they are not very conscious of these mistakes and their consequences. Taking this into account, parents must understand that the most important thing in that moment is to talk and hear their children.
By maintaining a fluent communication with our teenagers and letting them express themselves, parents will ensure that the relationship with their children won`t be broken and also will prevent them from making mistakes.