Parenthood is the hardest job you’ll ever not get paid for. Every day parents are put in positions where they have to make choices for their children. Choices regarding safety, schooling, personal issues, behavior, etc. You name it, and if you have a child you need to make a choice about it.
There are hundreds of choices that parents make. This list is just too long to even list. We make choices about what our children eat, wear, and do. We make the choices of what foods to buy at the grocery store. We make the choice of what is okay to wear to school and what is for play. We make the choice of what our children can listen to on the radio, and what they can watch on TV. We make the choices of how late they can stay up and what time they get up in the morning. We choose who the can have sleepovers with and whose houses are not appropriate places for them to go.
We make all of these choice with hopes that we are making good choices for our children. We make choices to keep our kids safe and well protected. We make choices that keep our children healthy and out of trouble. We make choices based on what is right and what feels wrong. We make discipline choices based on teaching our children to live in a positive and acceptable way. We make food choices based on what will help our children grow up to be big and strong not based on what they always like or want.
When we base our choices solely on what our kids want we may be pleasing them but are we doing the right thing? Making the right choices? No. A child would be very happy eating a bowl of candy for lunch instead of something healthy but if we choose to allow them based on their happiness we are actually hurting them. Children need to eat healthy foods for lunch even if they don’t want to. See? We are parents because we have kids. Until these children are old enough to make their own healthy choices we must make the choices for them.
The choices we make may not always be what makes our children happy. Maybe your child wants to go to the neighbors house unsupervised. Maybe it’ll make him happy, yeah, but is it the right thing to do? No. A young child should never go any where unsupervised. Allowing them to because they want to may be making the child happy, but it is not making a good parenting choice. See what I am getting at readers? Please, make good choices for your children. Sometimes they may not like it, but would you rather have your children mad or hurt? That is the question. Would you rather have them happy or acting and living acceptably? Yeah, running through the house makes kids happy, but if you let them and allow the rule to be broken someone will get hurt.
Sometimes the choices we make to protect our children leave us looking and feeling like the bad guy. That’s normal and natural. Parents need to make many difficult decisions each day for their children, and regarding their care. Many of these choices your children will not like, such as no candy for lunch. They may be mad, they may call you so mean for not allowing them to have candy for lunch, but you know children have to eat healthy and you as a parent are responsible for feeding them healthy, whether they like it or not. Stay strong readers, make good choices for your kids based on what is best for them, and not always just based on what they want.
