Parenting 101

What were the best parts of how you were parented (since the worst parts don't really belong in a public class blog)?

Based on my life, the best part about how my parents parented was having a sit down dinner everyday. Many families do not have sit downs dinner but I still do. I feel that sitting down with your family for dinner plays a vital role in connecting with your family members. When the family sits down to have dinner together, they are able to talk to each other about their day and their problems. It's a sort of bonding for the family. When I go over to a friend's place most of the time they do not sit down with the family for dinnertime. When I observe those families, they seem more disconnected. They do not seem to know how to interact with each other comfortably. I'm not saying that my family is all lovey dovey and happy but at least we are able to talk to each other about our issues. Many children lack an adult in their lives that care about them enough for them to be sit with them and chat about life. Every person is the same, without an outlet for their emotions, they become secluded and tend to have more emotional problems than someone with a release. If people don't have family members to turn to, they often confide in a friend but how often do secrets within friends stay secret? It's hard to find a friend good enough that deserves your emotions, many would turn around and end up hurting you. I personally have had too many bad experiences to not know how it feels to not have anyone around and I know first hand how it is to seclude yourself from the world. I went through a stage, well many stages rather, where I confided in people who I thought were my friends and lets just say that none of those situations ended well on my side of the relationship. I stated earlier that people have grown up with sit down dinners should not have to experience a lack of emotional release but I can account for this easily. Yes, the best part about my parents' parenting was the sit down dinners but that was when I was younger. As I grew older, my dad was out of the table because he took an overnight job that resulted in him only coming home once a week. Next to leave the table was my mom. Unlike my dad, she is very capable to eating dinner together with the rest of the family but instead, she chose to go either swimming or to her friend's place after work. My parents "leaving" the dinner table resulted in a distant relationship between them and I. But even with them gone, I always had dinner with my brother and sister in law because they took up cooking the meals and setting the table. Even with my parents not present or there for me, I always have my brother and sister in law by my side. They've been together for 11 years this past Friday, do the math and they've been playing an active role in my life since I was 7 years old. They have been providing the parenting that I had missed out on since then.


Do you think parenting will "come naturally" or do you think you'll have to research multiple perspectives and come up with a (possibly evolving) model in collaboration with other family members? Did your family read books about how to parent you or do informal research such as talking to other family members?

Personally, I think parenting will come naturally. Parenting is not a role that can really be taught through books and research and such, people will normally go back to analyze how they were parented and use that as a model to curve how they will parent their children. Parenting is also based a lot on morals. Many people use their morals or "human nature" to make decisions on how to raise their children. I think one major way of parenting is using common sense. Without common sense, the world would be lost. I feel that morals and common sense can go hand in hand. Morals are just a person's "right" judgment and common sense is just what's normal. Sometimes I wonder where common sense came from. Why the hell do we all think alike? I really don't get it sometimes. How did people come to realize that the decisions they make and how they do things is considered "common" "sense". Where did it start?? Anywho let's leave that for a whole nother conversation. Parenting should come naturally to humans. We are just another species of animals, why should we need to learn from books where as wild animals don't? Maybe it's because our minds are corrupted by all the propaganda and negative things in the world that causes us to worry about and doubt our natural skills.

As I mentioned earlier, my brother and sister in law are more or less another set of parent figures for me and have always been there since I was 7 years old. They did not need any research or learning in order to make me feel like they cared. They were fresh out of their teenage years, how could anyone have expected them to do what they have done for me? My parents were well in their 40s and they weren't capable of doing that for me. Everybody provided a different form of comfort and care but in the end I think parenting is jsut a natural skill that should not need to be taught.