If you're new here you might want to check out our top recommendation for parents. You can get a copy of The Total Transformation Program for free for a limited time, and it truly is a fantastic resource.

As parents, we all understand the trials of parenting. Mistakes are common; indeed, they are part of the territory. The process of learning to be a parent is difficult, and our first child is always the trial by fire. The second child is almost never as much like the first as we expect, and we learn rapidly that what works with one child doesn’t necessarily work with another.

Even the third and successive children present new problems, frequently revolving around the idea of fairness: the rules for one child should, after all, be the same as the rules for another. Sometimes this can be difficult, and parenting mistakes occur as a result. But how do you fix them – or, even better, avoid them?

One of the most common parenting mistakes is to think that your child doesn’t understand the situation, so it’s not important to be fair. Children have long memories; whenever a situation is important to them, for whatever reason, they will recall that situation for many years to come… potentially into adulthood. Even though your child cannot process and interpret your actions today, those actions may very well be remembered later – and they will be processed and interpreted by an older child, who is more than capable of understanding them.

Another of these parenting mistakes – one almost every parent is guilty of making at some point – is to expect all children to be the same. Whether we’ve got multiple children ourselves, or simply have experience with other people’s children, there are many elements of a child’s personality that simply are not the same as other children. While there are certainly common areas of behavior and intellect among all children, these are not as large as most of us expect.

Which leads us to the last of the common parenting mistakes most parents make: relying too much on our own experiences as children. The way our own parents dealt with situations is not always the best way, and the way we would have liked them handled as children is not always the way we should handle them as parents. Our children are not the same children we were, and they certainly don’t live in the same kind of world.

The most important question, of course, is how do we avoid these parenting mistakes? How do we remain mindful of how our actions will be remembered, understand the differences among children, and avoid too much reliance on our own childhood?

As with most parenting questions, there are no easy answers – but unlike our own parents, there is much more detailed help available. Simple awareness can be enough to avoid these parenting mistakes, but there are many programs available that can help us raise our children effectively and intelligently… without having to become experts in child development ourselves.

There’s no way to avoid all parenting mistakes. We’re human; we make mistakes. But with a little thought and effort, we can avoid the larger ones, and raise our children quite well all the same.

To learn more about parenting mistakes I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

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