Giving Your Children Liberty to Learn Makes them Competent

Anshul and Nishtha are extremely doting and hands-on parents. They leave no stone unturned to give a good upbringing to their 9-year-old son, Prayaan. They are perfect at managing their office schedules, taking breaks to spend productive time with him and encouraging him round the clock to do various activities and help him complete all his tasks. Despite a very well balanced and perfect parenting, they observe that Prayaan hesitates with relatives, neighbours and the less frequent visitors. He keeps maximum distance with new acquaintances and never feels comfortable when strangers are around. After weeks’ discussion, the parents found the reason in their own behaviour when Prayaan was a toddler, they never allowed him to walk freely in a garden, never used a public transport with him and never let him do his school activities and projects alone. They never wanted him to do things in his own way just to facilitate him and avoid mistakes. Over-possessive attitude of the parents and over assistance in his hobbies and interests made him dependent and introvert; the results are quite obvious, now he doesn’t want to mingle with new people and never feels confident in doing things alone. For every miniscule thing he looks forward for his parents support.

Give Your Children Liberty to learn and Build them Stronger than ever

When children are not given the liberty to learn, doing things alone, making mistakes and facing challenges they don’t grow as resilient youth and avoid taking risks in life. The more freedom they get at doing things and completing tasks, the more robust they become in making decisions and neutralizing threats. So try to give them opportunities to struggle and learn on their own, it will give them an impetus to unveil their strengths and capabilities. 

The major factor responsible for why parents don’t allow their children to make mistakes and confront challenges and failures is the family system of today’s era. Let’s read how it affects:

The Growing Prevalence of Nuclear Families

The traditional Indian joint family system which is based on the principles of collectivism, promotes social cohesion and interdependence among the members of the family and the little ones imbibe the strongest values at a very early age. However, with the growing culture of nuclear families, children’s social and emotional growth has faced a setback and the over alert and agile parents of today have added fuel to fire. The child is the only centre of attraction in a nuclear family so the parents want to facilitate him/her more than what is required. As we know a child’s incipient personality is greatly influenced by what he observes at home in his formative years so when a child grows up doing most of the tasks with the assistance of others, he never develops a streak to plunge into newer realms and grows with myopic attitude. So as a parent and guardians, we must give a required level of liberty to our children to make them more competent.

 

Have Strong Faith in Children’s Efforts

Parents are the primary agents for shaping up their children’s personality and their open behaviour can make children strong, stable, resilient and practical if they respect their individuality, freedom of choice, privacy and personal space. Mostly, people think that children should be given liberty to learn alone at a certain age so that they don’t make mistakes. But they fail to understand that mistakes are the best teachers and, by expressing such ideology they reveal that they lack faith and trust in their children’s efforts, and this practice leaves a lasting impression in child’s memory and proves a major deterrent in cultivating self-belief and self-confidence. Talk freely and positively about their mistakes so they consider mistakes as a part of learning process.

The famous Hollywood actress, humanitarian and tabloid star, Angelina Jolie speaks about her mother, who died from ovarian cancer at the age of 56, as an “extraordinary woman”. She describes about her mother that she was an ardent art lover and always supported her for whatever she wanted to choose for herself. She let her children explore the nuances of an actor’s life and how to express themselves in difficult situations. Angelina further adds, she would sit in the car for hours till her auditions continued and rejoice with her like a bird on her selection. The most amazing part of her parenting was she would embrace difference of personalities and was open to all experiences. She never tried to make her daughter a mould of her rather raised her with art and creativity and both were very different from each other as two women. Giving children liberty to learn things and explore life and people on their own offers new horizons to their imagination and creativity. 

 

Let Children Experience all Kinds of Emotions

Giving emotional liberty to a child is very important yet we never want our children to get angry, scared, feel threatened or disappointed. It’s absolutely normal if a child is scared of a spider or a lizard but we do our best to avoid our child’s confrontations with these emotions and here we make a mistake of providing him/her an over protective environment and obstruct his way of growing as a fearless person. Struggling and working on a challenge during a child’s growth years is always good for brain’s neurological growth. On the contrary, the children in an over protective environment avoid challenges and shy away from taking risks if they find any possibility of failure in their attempt. This impacts a child’s holistic development and he starts having inhibitions. We should never forget that struggles are helpful experiences and always vital for facilitating learning and growth.

Also Read: Never-to-Advise-Adolescents

Parents’ mindset and their approach regarding an open and flexible way of nurturing the young minds determine whether the children’s development is fixed or malleable. They should also focus on the importance of efforts and mistakes in the process of learning. If parents give their children liberty to learn and explore, children will grow as confident and innovative youth and this attitude of parents will definitely have sizeable effects on their skills and learning. You are always a role model for your child so just think As a Parent Do You Preach or Perform? Learn to be responsive and consistent in all your interactions and activities with your kids, encourage them to pay and buy smaller things from themselves in your presence. Let them make their choice even if you feel they may fail; if they succeed they will rejoice, if they fail they will learn from their mistakes and you will learn more. Trust me, your child always teaches you to be a better parent, you just need to understand and identify their responses and build an empathetic coordination with your kids, rest you are doing perfectly fine!