Parenting and Meeting Children's Needs

The topic I would like to discuss in my blog this week is a topic that has resonated in my mind for quite some time. Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a mom. I always knew that education was important, and I knew that I would work to obtain a degree in some field that was fascinating to me, but I also have always hoped and dreamed of becoming a mother. That led me to do a lot of pondering on the question, well, what is the purpose of parenting? If becoming a parent is something I would like to do so badly, then what is it about parenting that is so important? I believe that there is more than one purpose to parenting. I think that parenting helps us to become better people and make better decisions, and I also think that it protects and prepares a child to survive and thrive in the world they will live in. Raising children is no easy task, and it requires a lot of time and effort. All children have needs, and it’s the parents’ responsibility to help to meet those needs. It’s up to the parents to decide how they are going to help to meet the children’s needs.

There are roughly five categories of needs that children and teens have. Contact and belonging, power, protection, withdrawal, and challenge. However today, I would like to just focus my intentions on talking about contact and belonging. This is an extremely important part of helping children to grow developmentally, emotionally, and psychologically. So many problems stem from children whose needs were not met through contact or belonging. For example, some good family friends have a son who struggles with reactive attachment disorder. As a baby, his needs for being touched and held were not met, which resulted in complications later in his life. Most of the time, cases don’t get this extreme, but I fear that there are a lot of things limiting that contact that people are needing to thrive. For example, advances in technology have done a lot to limit people’s contact with one another. Recently, covid-19 has limited people’s contact. It is so necessary to people’s lives, but it is happening far less frequently.

Just as important as contact helping people survive and thrive, is the sense of belonging. We all need to feel like we belong somewhere or that we can contribute. Children, especially, need to get taught this by their parents. Some ways that the parents can do this is by helping their children feel like they can participate in important activities at a young age. For example, letting your child know that you appreciate them for helping around the house is one way to show your child that they belong and are contributing to something.

The driving force that should be motivating the parent’s relationship with their child should be love. When the parent’s heart is at peace, they are able to make better and healthier decisions regarding their children. It is important to note this because it ties right in to the purpose of parenting. When we treat our children with love and respect, we are helping to protect and prepare children to survive and thrive in the world that they are living in. Naturally, when we are guiding the way we parent our children with love, we also are helping to meet the needs of our children in a healthy way. Every child is different and the applications to raising children will be different, however the love we feel toward them and the principles to help meet our child’s needs should always remain the same.