Good parenting is essential for your child's success in life – here’s why!

Being a parent is one of the hardest ‘jobs’ you will ever do. It will be filled with love and passion for your children and family but it will also pull all the energy out of you by the end of some days. After work, maybe one or two jobs, paying the bills and little money left over and your kids tugging at you to want this and that, it’s no wonder parents feel washed out sometimes and put things on their ‘to do parent list’ in the ‘too hard’ basket. Because it does become hard, much harder sometimes than you ever thought.

The bonus though is your vision of your beautiful children who are successful, can follow their goals and dreams, make you proud and have good boundaries for a wonderful life for them and a life that you too can share with them as an adult. BUT if your parenting is askew that will not happen.

Its hard being a parent

Some days you may think, ‘did I sign up for this’ and other days life will flow and it will be wonderful. So, let’s tackle those some HARD DAYS. There are some things that work well and others that don’t. Let’s look at this with an open mind.

Surely every parent goes in wanting their child to succeed, to have a wonderful balanced, happy life where they can enjoy living? That doesn’t happen if YOU as a parent slack off. Oops! Did I just make it even harder to be a mum or dad? Not really.

What is your role in good parenting being essential for your childs success?

What I can tell you is that you are not there to be your kids ‘best friend’. They will hopefully have a few of them in school and other people in their life. They don’t need YOU to fill that position. So, stop trying to be a nice guy and catering to their every whim. Put some discipline in place. And firstly, get YOUR priorities right.

Sure, it’s great that he/she made that goal, or the soccer team or the dance class. Sure, it’s great to see them on stage but that will not get them a job or a career. Sure, it’s great to go to Aunt Lucy’s family dinner on a school night and being with family is very important, but that will not help them to compete with the thousands of kids from overseas getting in to university or that job they really wanted and our kids missing out. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not the overseas kid’s fault. It’s our parenting skills that have gone so soft it’s beyond ridiculous.

Excuses? Excuses

The number of excuses to not go to the first job as mum needs help with the huge family dinner for this and that, or the excuses to not do the homework, or the reading, or the tutoring. The excuses to not go to school. The excuses not to study. Or how do I study? Study is NOT reading. It’s comprehension and memorising. And if your kid can’t memorise and doesn’t understand then they can’t study. And It’s not a parent’s job to teach them that. It’s a teacher or tutor’s job. And if your kid is not putting in at least 5 hours personal study time on top of homework and assessments in years 7-9 then they will not compete with the other kids who do their homework, homeschooling and tutoring and are studying. And by the time they get to year 10- 12 they will be so behind it will be an even bigger effort to learn the skills.

So what do I do?

So, what do YOU as a parent do about this? In years 9 onwards cancel the soccer and footy down to a friendly game once a week. Cancel the dance classes to once a week. Cancel the drama classes. Unless your child actually does the schoolwork FIRST. Take away the phone and iPad. Yes, there will be scenes and whinging and they will say they hate you. Grin and bear it. Why? Because they won’t hate you when they graduate from university or run that huge corporation or take in their first million, or billion dollar cheque from that block of units they just built or the business that carries their name.

History can help you

Your father and mother, depending how old you are, or your grandparents or great grandparents probably came to this country with NOTHING! If they had something they are lucky. But many came with nothing. You may still have very little compared to other people today. Don’t you want better for your kids? Unfortunately, there is only one way to get that. HARD WORK. And that hard work is not gained from soccer, singing, dancing or running kilometres unless you are Olympic material. And so, few of us are.

So, good parenting for a child's success means that our job as a parent is to teach our kids the hard stuff. To put up with the ‘I hate you’ and the whinging and teach them how to be RESPONSIBLE for their own life. How to have good boundaries and mean ‘no’ when they say no and know how to stick to it. They won’t learn that if you bend to their every whim, bribe them to do what THEY should do for their future. They will learn that with DISCIPLINE. NO means NO and that’s the end of the story. And your answer to their whinging is ‘what part of the word NO did you not understand? You are not their friend; you are their parent.

The importance of good boundaries

YOU need to have good boundaries to show them what that means. YOU need to have the discipline to MODEL who they should become as a parent. Otherwise, their argument becomes, ‘you don’t do it then why should I?’ And that is a good, honest valid point.

So as a parent WAKE UP! Up your game, say no. Make them study and do their homework. Get on their back. Clock off as being their friend. And the deal is when they succeed you will be in the front row cheering for them to pick up that prize. The second thing to do is to TRY to make yourself the model for them. They will do as you do not as you say. You don’t want them to smoke then you don’t smoke. Otherwise, why should they not do it. It’s good enough for mum or dad so you can’t expect them to not do it.

None of us will ever be perfect. But we are all a work in progress and we have the ability to be better in our lives and make better lives for our kids. Do what you need to do to make yourself better, happy and enjoy your life. In that way you are teaching them to enjoy life, in a good way.

Final words

I can promise you none of this will be easy. As one mum to another it will be hard as hell. As a mum to a dad, I can promise you that you will be proud when the job is done and you see your kids shine and have a great life. Way better than yours. Better than your parents and grandparents. That is progress. To build a generation that loves life and truly lives. You won’t do that if you don’t try for YOURSELF. Good luck with it. It’s exhausting and yet also exhilarating. And it will be the greatest job you will ever do. It’s called BEING A PARENT.