Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (12): Parenting Boys and Girls

Gender is no doubt a huge factor in parenting. Many parents would like to know their baby’s gender before it is born, because gender matters to them. In our society, the role of girls and women is different from the role of boys and men. It is hard to ignore these roles and treat kids equally, because in the eyes of our society they are not equal.

So what should we do? Should we parent our kids differently if they are boys or girls or should we treat them just the same?

Research on people’s attitude towards boys and girls has found that parents and adults generally treat boys and girls differently even when they are just babies. In a famous research done with a group of babies that were dressed in pink or blue (without any relation to their real gender) the researchers discovered that the pink babies (presumably the girls) were picked up more by the adults and received more eye contact than the blue babies (presumably the boys).

How do you think this translates to parenting?

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (11): Government Policy Suggestions

Parenting and families are important parts of our society. However, many decisions made by governments recognize the role of parents in building the future only partly. Unfortunately, ignoring the important role parents play in building our society has a direct impact on every section of our life.

When parents cannot support themselves, it is hard to expect them to support their children. Many of the skills required to be a good parent cannot be developed from feeling enormous love towards the kids. I used to say that “love is the answer”, but although love is the foundation of parenting, it is not enough in order to raise healthy, happy, good, smart, social, successful and contributing citizens.

Governments can support parents by investing in the right places to prevent greater expenses in the future. For example, if parents could support their kids’ health and wellbeing, the health system could be smaller. If parents could support their kids’ relationships or to manage their finances, the welfare system could shrink and the government could invest more in development, infrastructure and economic growth.

This week, I asked the top parenting bloggers for suggestions we could give government policy makers to support parents and improve parenting and here is what they thought about it. It is interesting to read what they think. Enjoy!

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People Change

When you read the title “people change”, you might be thinking, “Well, of course they do”, but very often, when you are very close to another person for a long time, these changes are difficult to notice. On the other hand, sometimes it is not the other person who changes, but us, and that just changes the way we see them.

When we start a long-term relationship, we are so intent on making it work that we overlook things we would prefer to be different “as long as we’re happy together”, but the discomfort caused by those overlooked things grows over time to the point where we suddenly notice them. One day, we are surprised to discover for the first time something our partner has been doing or saying for years. All that time, we dismissed it in different ways (“bad mood”, “something at work”, “didn’t really understand”, “only joking”, etc), but now, we look at “this thing” head on and think our partner has changed.

In a strange sort of way, the things that attracted us to that special person in the first place can become annoying over time, until we determine that the person has changed. We also get used to good things (annoying, but natural), which makes us take the good side of any character trait or behavior for granted, while getting more and more upset with the bad side.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (10): Parenting Tips

As a parent, I am in constant search for parenting tips. In my parenting workshops, I have a goal of learning at least one great parenting tip from my audience and you know what? I always do and I am very happy and grateful for it.

At the beginning of my education career, I gave up one big desire: to re-invent the wheel. It was not easy, because some people thought it made me less creative, but I always gave the example of my mom as a chef – she uses the same ingredients as everybody else but combines them differently. Over time, I stopped asking her about cooking recipes and started asking more about cooking tips, because with the click of my mouse, I can find millions of recipes, but they all lack the experience.

It is the same in parenting. It is even truer in parenting. Asking parents what works for them is a great way to accumulate enough information and make a good parenting style from it.

In a way, when I asked the Top Parenting Bloggers to share their parenting tips, I hoped to find some I can adopt too. I was very happy to discover many good tips and I hope you will too.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (9): Profound Parenting Moment

Every one of us has a story to tell about why we think the way we do. When you sit in a seminar and listen to the latest wealth creation guru, you will always hear a story behind him or her, a story that tells the audience what brought them to their success. I guess it is similar in every area of life. As we try to discover what has brought us to adopt our current philosophy, there is always some special event that has changed us in a profound way.

The profound moments in our lives shape who we are not only in good ways and can also explain our fears, our self sabotage and our failures. As a life coach, I know that finding these moments is often a key to moving forward.

The reason I posed this question to the Top Parenting Bloggers was not for you to learn from them but more as an encouragement to ask yourself the question and answer it to yourself. I see it as an important question that should not be skipped when examining our parenting philosophy. Whether you would like to share it or not, I highly recommend you take a moment and ask yourself “What was my most profound parenting moment?”

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (7): What drives you nuts?

Parenting can be a hard task. Although we love our kids very much, there are many things in parenting that can drive even the calmest person nuts.

When I ask parents about their challenges, they talk mostly about their kids’ (bad or annoying) behavior. However, I think that is a reflection of other challenges we have. As you will see from the top parenting bloggers’ answers below, parenting challenges are varied and reflect our wider perspective on parenting.

In this part of Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss, I asked each blogger about the things they find challenging as parents. I told them it did not have to be their kids’ behavior but in parenting in general or anything else directly or indirectly related to raising kids. I believe you will find what they have to say very interesting.

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Who’s Your Favorite Grandparent? (Poll)

For the 21 years of our oldest daughters’ life, we have been contemplating the issue of our kids’ relationship with their grandparents. You see, our kids have grown up far away from their grandparents most of their life, but their relationships with one side of the family is stronger that with the other side.

To my surprise, the relationship to grandparents has nothing to do with how nice the grandparents are or what culture they are from, how nice you are, how nice your kids are or where you choose to live around the world. It is linked more closely to evolution – that survival mechanism of humanity to keep the dynasty and strengthen it. Grandparents invest in the grandchildren they are convinced are theirs.

In 1998, a researcher named DeKay came up with a theory to explain findings from researches conducted two years previously (Euler & Weitzel, 1996 and Boon & Brassoni, 1996) who claimed that grandmothers on the mother’s side invested in their grandkids the most. DeKay came up with a theory linking the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren to certainty. His theory was that grandparents invest in the grandchildren they are certain are their offspring. In other words, the grandparent who has less doubt of being genetically related to the child and therefore to the grandchild, is more likely to invest in this relationship to support his or her “breed”.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (6): Education

Whether we pay for it through taxes or fees, the education system is a service to us parents. Most parents, even if they can afford to stay home and be their kids’ teacher, would rather go to work and do something else. Although parents are the most important educators of their own kids, being a teacher is a whole different skill that would be unfair to expect every parent to master.

When we send our kids to school, we share an important part of parenting with others. Our kids spend 12 to 13 years of their life in the education system with other people who pass on their knowledge, values and attitudes to them. Sometimes, we can afford to choose these people directly, but often, we are bound by financial or geographical circumstances and we do not have much of a choice.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (5): Ideal Child

The question “What’s an ideal child?” comes up many times in my parenting workshops. I find it fascinating to discover and re-discover that some parents have only a vague idea of what an ideal child should be like, yet they are disappointed with their own children for not being ideal.

Furthermore, much of these parents’ daily energy is spent on maximizing their kids’ academic achievements, but in their definition of the ideal child, there is no mention of academic achievement.

Our definition of the ideal child forms the framework of our parenting plan. Whether our definition is conscious or not, it still determines how we relate to our kids.

In this part of Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss, I asked each blogger to describe their ideal child. I find it interesting that each of them had a different definition of what it means to them.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (4): Parenting Changes Life

Many parents say parenting has changed their life.

As young woman, I wanted to join a course to become a facilitator of parenting workshops. The director of the project said to me, “Ronit, in order to be a parent educator, you need to be a parent first”. And she declined my application.

No matter what I said, she just replied, “When you have your first child, you will understand”. She was determined and I failed to convince her to accept me into the program.

Later that year, when I held Eden in my arms after a long, hard labor that ended in a caesarian section, I understood why.

Today, in this chapter of Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss, our experts answer the question “How has parenting changed your life?”

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