Purchasing

Mary Walker

How much do you participate?
January 31, 2008

When your children are grown and have moved away from home, you become the expert on how to raise children. Way back when my daughter was small, everyone had a book written by Dr. Spock, he was the expert on how to raise a child.

A good friend of mine had four children under the age of five, one set of twins. His sister and her husband were child psychologists. They continually sent him books and told him what he was doing wrong. Several years later they had a child and they told him he could probably throw away half the books they had sent him. They were not sure all of that “stuff” would work.

We all have our ideas on how to raise children and if they are grown, we can see a lot of things we should have done differently. The focus now is child participation, which is a relatively new concept in the thinking surrounding child development. Participation is about adults listening to and involving children in the issues which concern them and most importantly taking note of what they say.  

Listening is not one of the more common human virtues, particularly with respect to children. The old maxim: “Children should be seen and not heard” still holds sway with far too many people. With the best intentions of listening, it is all too easy to offer an encouraging smile but no real ear to the outpourings of our children. We need to take that phone out of our ear and turn the computer off and listen to our children.

A child who does best at school and in life in general is used to being listened to from the earliest age. Recent research has shown that the way parents talk to their children and allow them to respond in the first three years of their life makes a huge difference later in developing reading skills.

Children from welfare families are exposed to 3 million words a year while children of professionals are exposed to 11 million words a year. The process of child participation begins in the home. As parents, we need to be aware that listening to our children is as vital to their development as proper nourishment.

Remember you can not go back and recapture the special moments, the sports event, the school plays and all of the events special to your children. Take time out from the office and your work and enjoy these things.

Posted by Mary Walker on January 31, 2008 | Comments (1)