Motherhood is said to be one of the most significant chapters in a woman’s life. It is that period when everything is unfamiliar, scary, and exciting at the same time. Once you’ve entered motherhood, there’s no going back. Your life will change forever, and some things will never be the same. Some people think that being a mother is a simple job, but it’s not. There are a lot of struggles that all moms must face on a daily basis. In addition to that, there are also certain things that only mothers would understand.
As parents, we are our children’s first educators. Their first “words” are sounds we repeat to them, like “Mama” or “Dada”. They learn by listening and observing. They have the ability to send back sounds until they form into semi-coherent words. They also have the ability to express what they feel or what they want, based on whatever communication mechanism they develop at a certain age.
Wonders of Growing
That is one of the wonders of child development. It does not always lean towards the positive side. “With infants, parents have to cope with physical exhaustion from sleep deprivation and the non-stop cycle of feeding, burping, cleaning, and comforting a fussy baby,” says clinical psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Ph.D. “During the toddler years, parents have do deal with an opinionated little person who is simultaneously trying to figure out the world and run it.”
Impressionable as they are, children still don’t have filters that adults use to accept or reject things they pick up from their environment and other people. It could lead to harmless things like toddlers learning “bad words”. Sometimes, it goes to the extreme end of the spectrum like children developing deviant behavior.
Source: pixabay.com
Dealing with Deviant Behavior
Deviant behavior can manifest as early as childhood. While some parents become instantly alarmed when their children display unusual behavior, most of the time it’s just an overreaction. We must understand that children are still developing their sense of self, while at the same time, soaking up information from their environments like sponges; we cannot expect them to suddenly act the way society expects people to act. Children are still slightly empty vessels still learning to act according to social cues developed by adults.
Source: barefootsocialwork.weebly.com
Paying Attention to Deviant Behavior
Deviant behavior is not so rare that parents should disregard it completely. In fact, good parenting must always involve constant vigilance over factors that could contribute to a child’s personality development.
Studies have shown that the presence of violence in a person’s early formative years is more often than not a huge predictor of aggressive behavior like crime in adulthood. Nowadays, it’s hard to control when a child could witness violent acts. It could be from the media, like news reports of a violent nature, or from entertainment like movies and even video games.
Exposure to such themes, especially during their early formative years, implies a high risk of developing violent personalities. This is related to the social learning theory, wherein children imitate behavior that they see, behaviors that are not limited to what they see in the television but also those they see from their parents.
Source: tutorialspoint.com
Influence of the Environment on Behavior Formation
Sometimes, the presence of violence in a child’s life comes directly from parents who inflict them pain as a form of punishment, which leads us to another theory associated with childhood development: the operant conditioning. As children learn by mimicking people and things around them, the likelihood of these behaviors being repeated as their own depends on whether adults answer with reinforcement or punishment.
“Children are generally not as good as adults at stating their reasons or arguing logically, so it is unfair for parents to expect their children to always give good reasons for what they do,” Peter Gray, Ph.D. wrote. “The parent’s attempt to argue with a child leads too often to a verbal beating and shaming, which undermines the goal of understanding and support.”
Responsibility of the Parents
Parents have the responsibility of building the stepping stones of the personalities their children could possibly develop.
Does the emergence of deviant behavior indicate bad parenting? Should we be conscious of every little detail we expose our children to?
The answer is, it depends. Yes, we want to avoid molding our children into individuals that society will frown upon. But “helicopter parenting” is not conducive to our children’s development as well. We have to give them some leeway to develop on their own, while still on the ready to correct them when they do something bad.
“The parent must be willing to change their behavior first, in order for their kid to change,” says adult and teen psychotherapist Linda Esposito, LCSW. “A common pitfall is confusing discipline with punishment.”
The key is to balance the authoritative side of parenting to the good and loving side that children need as well. And the most important thing to remember is that there is no “good parenting”.
Being a parent doesn’t happen overnight – it requires a lot of commitment. You have to understand that there are restrictions on providing kids with their needs and giving them their freedom. You just don’t give them everything they ask you to give them or let them do anything they want. You have to be very careful in deciding things for them, especially in those times when they might think that they don’t need your assistance in the decision-making.
There are a few times when moms and their children feel like they belong to different sections of the world. The difference in choices, expectations, and wishes are issues that produce clashes and misunderstanding between them. “Conflict in families, especially between mothers and children, is part of the natural order of things,” says Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW.
Moms will always feel like their children are doing everything wrong and they have to make it right. On the other hand, their children will misunderstand this course of action as being a controlling parent with overboard expectations. It is just one of the examples of misunderstood motherly behaviors which we are going to talk about in this article.
Being a career woman with a husband and child can be quite taxing and challenging role to do. Doing paperwork and then cooking for dinner or having a meeting then rushing to the nursery due to certain circumstances is just examples of these stressful situations.
According to Joanne Stern, PhD, “The bottom line difference between working mothers who are challenged yet happy, and those who are continually frustrated and down in the dumps, is to first recognize and embrace this one fact: Being a working mother is hard. Period. Don’t pretend that it’s not or that you should be able to make it easy.”
However, some proper time management and planning ahead can make it possible and easier to do. Doing it may be hard at first, but things will go smoother as time goes by (well, most of the time).
Not every woman has a disposition of being a mother and building a family right away. It is especially true for females who have busy careers, want to continue living a carefree life, and those who don’t want to get married and have children. However, it is hard to brush off the maternal instinct of wanting to be a mother as the years pass. Then, you start questioning yourself if you are ready to be a mother. If this is the case, then it wouldn’t hurt to look for signs if you already have what it takes to be one. “Just because you don’t know what’s coming doesn’t mean you aren’t ready for it,” says Kristi Angevine, MD, an OB/GYN in Chattanooga, TN. “You just have to know that it’s going to be entirely new.” As women, this is a crucial phase in our lives which needs deep thinking and consideration.
