Parents choose to shield their children from the harsh reality of the world because they fear that a single mistake could ruin their child’s life. However, if you are a parent and you truly want to arm your child with the right skills and knowledge to be able to get through life’s challenges in one piece, you have to learn to let go, help build their self esteem and allow your children to make mistakes and learn on their own.
Spoon-feeding your kid will work probably for the couple years, but, eventually, your child will develop an identity of his own and start exploring independently. Keeping a watchful and hawk-like attention on him will only stifle his personal and emotional growth and disallow him from becoming the person he is meant to be.
A child that constantly hides under his mother’s skirt is not likely to succeed in life any more than the child that has learned to ask questions and explore life early on. However, this doesn’t mean you have to raise a defiant brat. What is meant here is that your child should be self confident with enough self esteem to stand on his own two feet and stop depending on you for every activity and to solve every problem.
One of the things you can do to make sure that when the time comes that your offspring has to go out and face the world is to build her self esteem early in life. You can do this by allowing her to do things for herself. If you keep doing her favors, chances are, she won’t be able to learn and will always depend on you for everything. This is cute when she’s still young. But when she gets older and is still dependent on you, it isn’t healthy anymore.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that you should just let your child go and hurt himself. You still have to stay in the sidelines and watch him, while keeping a good distance, to make sure he doesn’t stray too far off course. Remember that you should leave him to explore what he wants and develop what he’s interested in. Don’t force your ideas on your offspring. Doing so would eventually breed a rebel.
Building your offspring’s self esteem means teaching him self confidence and helping him believe that he can achieve anything he puts him mind and heart into. A child with low self esteem will buckle and run at the sight of responsibility. A child armed with self esteem will tackle challenges head-on even if he is faced with difficulty. Challenges are what help a child thrive and survive in this world. Without problems, nobody will be able to appreciate victory.
It’s understandable that you want only the best for your child. In fact, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you dream that his life will be a lot better than yours. However, hiding him from the rest of the world won’t do him any good. Teach him to go out and make mistakes. Tell him that it’s okay to fail sometimes, because there’s always a silver lining behind every dark cloud. You offspring’s self esteem is his best defense against the world today. While you won’t be able to protect him forever, you can make sure he can cope beautifully if you arm him with self esteem.