Subject and Expectation:
In this first editorial in a continuing series, The Small Town Humanist begins to define steps that each of us can take that will effectively help to change the future of our world. Beginning by highlighting our most important contribution to our further evolution as a human race…being a good parent. Parenting is without a doubt the hardest job we will ever have, but also the most important job that we will ever have in our life. The goal is to encourage us all to work as hard as we can at this responsibility and to always be what our children need us to be.
Introduction:
Maybe it’s my age…or simply because of where I am in my life right now. I can not help but feel this overwhelming consciousness that the world is ready for a massive change. A change for the better. I know that sounds a little cheesy and like the lyrics of an overly sappy song, but with the complexity of our current situation on this planet, maybe that’s what we need right now…a little cheesiness in our life?
If you look into the statistics and the things that have been reported lately across the world, it’s evident that fewer and fewer people are looking to faith or religion for the answers. This article will not dwell too much on these matters, but it needs to at least be said at the outset. For centuries, mankind has looked to the Bible, his or her own faith, or a particular religion for the answers. Why is this? It’s pretty easy to understand when you consider what the majority of people in this world have grown up believing from birth.
Most humans in history were raised to have faith in a book that is firmly believed to have been inspired by the creator of all things, the creator of us, the entity that formed the earth and the universe, the being in the heavens that we have mostly been taught from infancy is the one that has the answers, because he created all things. Just clear your head for one moment and meditate on that. Think of the effect that those teachings perhaps have had on even you from infancy. This simple explanation that we just covered in a few sentences has literally shaped our evolution and our growth for thousands of years.
Again, we have spent enough time in other articles debating why religion has failed and this article is going to be driven by the optimism of discussing how we can all do better. We just felt that we had to start with the basics in the beginning, not only explaining how religion has dominated our existence and evolution for centuries, but psychologically why it has proven not to have the answers and not to lead humankind in the right direction.
This is a humanist organization with the mission of encouraging others to grow and to continue evolving together. The Philosophy of Humanism Theory is rooted in the optimistic thoughts that every single one of us is amazing and capable…and that when we stick together, we evolve together. This being said, we would like to begin discussing what each of us can do to concentrate on ourselves that absolutely can change our world. Maybe not overnight in some aspects, but we truly believe that these are the things that work.
These are the things that produce actual results and bring us together, build us up and do not tear us down. We are challenging ourselves and everyone else to do better…to be better. Even if we feel that we are a good person, there are always things that we need to improve on.
We hope you enjoy and we hope that you are able to make it all the way through the article with an open mind, accepting the fact that every single one of us CAN do better, and SHOULD do better every day. Enjoy friends!
Challenge Yourself to Be a Better Parent
If I say the phrase “I believe the children are our future” you will more than likely have a very famous Whitney Houston or George Benson song playing in your head right now. Or if you’re like me, you’ll immediately think of the scene in Coming to America where Randy Watson, portrayed by Eddie Murphy, does the insanely funny cover of that famous song. Regardless of what entered your mind, that philosophy is extremely simple yet so accurate and powerful. How we raise our children and the families that they get to grow up in plays a tremendous part in shaping the future of the human race and this life.
My family and I are avid bike riders. I can’t tell you how many times we have been riding together through a neighborhood and said to our children….”just think, inside of each of those homes is a unique, separate world that the family has created for themselves, a whole separate ideology of what life is all about for those children to grow up in.” This is the power that we have as parents, the authority to create a set of rules, guidelines for discipline, expectations for the children to live by and to live up to.
It is our responsibility to govern the environment that our children grow up in. How they turn out is mostly going to be decided by how we choose to love them, support them, educate them, and lead them to be strong individuals that believe in themselves and the power that they have inside of them to be amazing. We have the immense responsibility to help them to inevitably decide whom they end up being as adults and the future caretakers of this world.
It’s a cycle that has been in existence for as long as we have. The children that we raise will always be the ones that we pass the torch to, with the enormous accountability to help our human race evolve to its greatest potential…to keep moving forward. If we break it down and be completely honest with ourselves, what is it that makes our world good or bad? What does it all boil down to? It’s us. Humans. We are completely and totally responsible for all of it, the good and the bad. So, how can we all do better as parents?
The Greatest Gift Ever Given
When you want to get a gift for your son or your daughter, how easy is it to think of getting them their favorite Barbie doll or that new bike they’ve been wanting? Although there is seemingly nothing better than seeing your child’s face light up on Christmas morning opening that gift that they’ve been talking about for months, there is a much more valuable gift that you can give to your child. The priceless gift of time.
Never miss an opportunity to spend time with your children. Let’s face it, life is over-the-top busy and stressful for all of us. It’s so easy to let a few days or even weeks slip by without giving solid attention to our children that crave it so badly. Work as hard as you can to always remember that the number one thing that your child craves is for you to spend quality time with them. Although there is nothing at all wrong with buying gifts for our children, there’s a very fine line that we never want cross where it can turn into us taking the easy road and trying to buy their love. It is unhealthy to both the child and the parent. It is never beneficial to a child’s upbringing.
Whatever your family’s thing is, whether it’s fishing, biking, sports, concerts, trips to the zoo, traveling…those are the things that your children want and need. They do not need you to buy them everything their heart desires for them to be truly satisfied. Quality time with your children has endless benefits. It has everlasting effects on your child’s mental well-being and their physical health as well. It can increase your child’s brain development and memory. There will undoubtedly be a stronger parent/child bond that is created. Children who get regular attention and time with their parents will grow to be more well-rounded adults, and inevitably continue the cycle by being better parents as well. The benefits reaped from spending time with our children can be endless.
Give them the greatest gift ever…your time!
Disciplining Children and Teaching Respect in Today’s Complicated World
Okay, here’s the deal. We would be straight up lying to ourselves if we couldn’t admit that there is a serious problem with the children that have grown up over the last 15-20 years. It seems like young people today feel completely entitled to do and act any way that they choose, without even the slightest concern for how they affect other people’s lives. This a very touchy subject which has the potential to set many people off but I really don’t care. I am truly troubled with how this young generation is going to handle life when they get out into the real world and how it’s going to severely affect our evolution as a race.
Let’s talk about the different phases that we’ve seen over the last hundred years in regards to the behavior of children in our world and how we’ve chosen to raise them with discipline. Back in the 20s and 30s, we had children that were raised to be extremely respectful and polite, yet we fell short as parents back then to encourage their psychological growth, building the individual personalities that they were to become as an adult. It seemed back then that children were not allowed to have a say in almost anything, or have an opinion. They were extremely respectful and polite, yet they were silenced often.
Then came the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Throughout these decades, the restraints that parents had on their children to keep their mouth shut and just obey every single command of the parent started to subside. You can see it in TV shows from back then. If you watch any episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, you’ll witness David and Ricky, not only being very polite and respectful to their parents and other adults, but they began to be allowed to express their personality at a very young age. They were encouraged to have an opinion as long as they were respectful about it.
Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, we saw an entirely different parenting style emerge. Enter the era of overbearing, tough love that was given to the children in those decades. Although spanking had always been a disciplinary measure used by many parents up to that point, the world saw a dramatic increase in the spanking of children and a much more hands-on approach to forcing kids to listen and obey. Anyone is free to correct me if I’m wrong or exaggerating, but it’s my opinion that these decades saw many cases of extremely violent father figures. If you were to ask anyone currently in their forties or fifties about how their father disciplined them, more than likely you would hear the same general claim that, “my father beat respect into me.” This style of carrying out discipline also had its downfall.
Being a child that experienced the heavy hand of my father, I definitely am not going to sit here and completely condone the violent beatings of children. There were many times when I know that I pushed my father to limits beyond his capacity, but I certainly don’t look back on those years as too beneficial to me. It is not my place or anyone else’s place to make a judgment call on what is the right way or wrong way for a certain parent to discipline their children. Every child is different and every parenting style is a little different; the combination of the two can be extremely unique and hard to figure out.
The long and short of it all is, there may be times when your five-year-old has taken on an attitude of complete and utter disrespect for everyone, screaming and yelling to get his or her way. We’ve all experienced this scenario in the supermarket at one point or another. At these times, if a parent decides that they’ve tried everything else and they feel that the only way they can get them to stop is to swap their butt a little bit, then it’s nobody’s place to judge them.
Let’s be completely clear. I am not condoning or encouraging any style of discipline at all. I am not a child psychologist. I am simply a parent who has successfully raised three wonderful young men, and I couldn’t really tell you exactly how we did it. Basically, unconditional love and support came first, then a firm but loving concern for how they turned out was a close second.
Raising children in this complicated world now is very hard. Everyone is bombarded by advice on how they should and shouldn’t raise their children. Sometimes this is good, but sometimes it is bad. Every situation is unique and what may have worked for one child may not work for the other. The simple fact is that they are your children and they are your responsibility. Accept that responsibility. Treat it as the precious and fragile thing that it is. It is your job to raise your children to be loving, communicative, happy, respectful, hard-working and educated.
Do your job parents! These children that we are raising are literally going to run the world very soon. Don’t raise selfish, entitled little assholes with zero respect or concern for other people, because the rest of the world is going to have to deal with them for many years. This is not how we evolve and this will cause us to go backward. We need our children to work together when they become adults, to take care of this planet, to manage our technological growth, to take care of each other and to take care of us. I’ll say it one more time…parents do your job!
Start from day one and never give up the battle to raise children to show proper respect for everyone in this life, never stop showing them how far simple politeness and compassion can go in their interactions with others. And above all, love them like the amazing gifts that they are.
The Invaluable Effects of Showing Unconditional Love and Support to Our Children
Consider how much the world has changed and how much it differs from our world and life just twenty or thirty years ago. With these changes and the current situation in which we live, we have heard and read much about giving unconditional love to our children in recent times. There are many that are very unclear as to how to show this unconditional love, stirring many discussions and opinions as to how to show it.
One simple rule. Love your children unconditionally, no matter what. Period! If your child comes to you at the age of thirteen and tells you that they are gay and that they’ve always felt that way, then you love and support them by helping them in any way that you can. We have evolved enough to understand and realize that these are very real psychological feelings that cannot, and should not, be repressed. Because of the relative acceptance for this in the world today, we are seeing more and more people being who they want to be. This is a beautiful thing because it makes them happy, and a world full of happy and content people is going to do nothing but thrive and advance together. Its hatred, judgment, and prejudice that breed a negative world that moves backward instead of evolving forward.
These sexuality issues are certainly not the only times when our children need our unconditional love. There are health issues where they need us to stand by them and lead them to strength. There is a multitude of adolescent issues as they go through their school years where they need us to just listen to them sometimes. We can be their parent, but we can also be their friends at the same time. Our children should never feel anything less than an open and supportive heart emanating from us to them.
In 2013, a study conducted by UCLA focused primarily on the correlation between lack of parental affection to children, manifesting severe health issues when they reached adulthood. A synopsis of this study and results from the newsroom at UCLA can be found here. The researchers studied 756 adults who had participated in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) program. One finding pointed to the fact that children who lacked parental warmth and affection were more likely to feel the effects in adulthood, manifested in such frailties as high levels of stress, cholesterol, cardiovascular issues, and high blood pressure. Expressing unbridled affection and love for our children can make them emotionally happier and relatively free of stress.
Our gift of affection and love will strengthen our bond with them and will carry on for a lifetime. Other studies over the years have also proved that their physical health and psychological well-being will be stronger with unlimited support from their parents as well. Although, it shouldn’t really necessitate a study to be done to prove these things, when common sense tells us all that when we place more of our loving focus on our children, then they will only benefit from this.
We’d like to point our readers to a wonderful resource for the modern-day parent, definitely worth looking into. Evolutionary Parenting with Tracy Cassels Ph.D.
So, does all of this mean that we should never discipline our children for fear that we may not be showing unconditional love? Absolutely not. If you truly love your children then you want nothing more than for them to turn out the best way possible. We are the adults with years of experience in life, not them. Whether they agree with this or not or even think that they need us, we know that they do. They need us to guide them. They need us to discipline them. They need us to teach them. They need us to lead them. However, all of this can be done with love and support; it just takes work and it’s not easy. There is nothing wrong with holding kids accountable for things that they do. If we don’t do this, then they will not be ready for life, because that’s what adult life is…accountability.
In Conclusion:
May all of us be encouraged to work as hard as we can to be what our children need us to be. The day that we became a parent, like it or not, you were handed the greatest responsibility as a human being on this earth…to raise another one. As said at the outset, it’s always been this way and it always will be this way; the children are the future. The love, support, discipline, guidance, and example that we give to them will shape the world of the future. There is simply nothing more important that we can do or be in the time we’ve been given on this rock than to do our part in helping the human race to evolve together. From within. Make it your strongest aim in life to be a better parent and you will absolutely help to change the whole world.
