Every parent’s desire is to raise children who grow up to be healthy, loving, and confident adults. The right seeds need to be planted early enough in life, so as to avoid emotionally unbalanced adults. I believe, that these seven rules of raising healthy children will  defininately result in well balanced adults.
Allow freedom of information.
For a family to be healthy, allow the freedom of information, allow your children to partake in age appropriate family discussions, please donât hide facts and information from them. This leads to open sharing of ideas, and a strong bond between parents and children.
Show your children respect.
You children arenât your possessions. Treat them like the young people that they are. Talk to them with respect and dignity, and value their inputs and suggestions. Communication is about listening, you donât have to agree with what you say, but you definitely need to listen to them.
Publicly and privately appreciate their successes, when they fail, listen to them, suggest ways of recovering from failure.
Accept your childrenâs feelings.
Accept that your child is going to have feelings of anger, joy, and sadness, among other feelings. Allow them to freely express them. Parents who overly discipline their children and deny their children the right to express their feelings raise emotionally deficit adults. Habits learnt in childhood manifest in adulthood.
Respect your childrenâs boundaries.
Respecting your childâs thoughts, dreams, and feelings is a simple way to respect the parent child boundaries. Â Any abuse whether, physical, verbal or emotional attacks theese boundaries. Simple things like monitoring their emails, SMS, WhatsApp chats, reading their diary or spying on them via their friends is not respecting their boundaries.
Allow children age-appropriate decisions, responsibility, and independence.
Teaching your children to make age-appropriate decisions, responsibility and independence can be done by teaching fiscal responsibility and financial decision making to them by giving them appropriate pocket money, allowing them to spend their money as they deem fit. Also, Allow them to independently spend the money they receive as gifts. But, Draw lines, donât overindulge financially. Hence, Children need support in learning how to problem-solve and make decisions. Parents usually err on one extreme or the other. Thus, Many children must take on adult responsibilities too young and never learn to receive or rely on anyone. Some children are controlled or pampered, become dependent and donât learn to make their own choices, while others are given unlimited freedom without guidance.
Have reasonable, predictable, humane rules and punishments.
Homes necessarily need rules to function effectively. Thus, no rules or rules that are too harsh are both detrimental to the rounded personality development of children. Hence, rules need to be safe, predictable and fair. When rules are unpredictable, harsh or not consistent, children learn to distrust their elders, and authority. Both the parents need to be consistent and united on the rules.
Nurture your children.
Nurture your children, nurturing is not indulging in toys and gifts, that is spoiling them. Thus, Loving and nurturing your children is spending quality time, listening to them with love and affection. Also, this is what makes them grow into well balanced, and confident adults.
Understand that one of our most important jobs as parents is to stay loving and separate from our children. We do this by clearly defining our principles, staying in our role as a parent, and sticking to our bottom lines.
About Dr. Prerna Kohli
She is a 100 women Achievers Award Winner (2016)from the Honorable President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee
Dr. Prerna Kohli is a Clinical Psychologist, a Public Speaker, a Workshop Facilitator and a Holistic Practitioner. She offers Heart-based workshops and lectures that focus on Life Balance, Self-awareness and Inner Peace. Dedicated to sharing her knowledge and compassion with others, Prerna blends intuitive wisdom with solid understanding, creating a powerful holistic approach, specializing in the areas of Emotional change.
Dr. Prerna Kohli is a leading Child Psychologist in India and provides both parents and children counselling on raising well rounded children.