I ran across this on HickoryHusker.com, and hope to employ it if my children decide to participate in athletics. It is a good guideline, but I don't know if you can ever have a "set in stone" set of guidelines to raising a child.Here it is:
1. Make tough decisions: Give your children roots, a stable place for them to be, and you can't always be the popular parent. Sometimes your kids have to hate you because they are hedonistic, selfish individuals who are learning to not be.
2. Get kids out of activities: One per semester. Children should have varied interests, but kids today participate in too many things. Everything is organized, give them time to be kids and meet up with the kids in the neighborhood to play games.
3. Raise your own children: Be there for them. Attend their athletic functions, their band shows, their spelling bees. Even if they don't want you around, be there. They may never want to share their lives with you, but ask and be there. Raise your child.
4. Realize that people are more important than things: Spend time with your kids even if it means you work less and can't afford a new car, big screen t.v., or an i-phone. Your relationship with your kids will last a lot longer than things. And all that time you worked, can never be replaced with time missed with your children.
5. Discipline your children with love: Again, sometimes you are going to be hated by your children, it is a part of growing up. Discipline them, but never allow them to have to guess if you love them or not.
6. Take your children to your place of worship: There is a world out there ready to instill their values on your children. Give your children good values so when they encounter that world, they have something stable to fall back on.
7. Have dinner together as a family: It shows that it is important to be together as a family. It sort of forces you to be in one place and communication can begin and flourish. You will find out a lot more over a meal, then walking into their room and asking "What's up?".
8. Realize your kids don't necessarily need what you didn't have: We all are guilty of spoiling our children. We need to realize that by giving our children too many things, we are not teaching them that people are more important than stuff.
9. Turn off your television: This is one of the things that is instilling the worlds values on your children. The things you don't blatantly see, are the things you should be worried about. Kids are like sponges picking up many things that we don't see because we are older. If you can't turn off the t.v. on a regular basis, at least do it at supper time.
10. Walk it! Don't talk it!: You can talk to your children and instill your values, but if you tell them one thing and do the opposite, you can forget it. If you tell them not to smoke and you do, they will. If you tell them not to sleep around, and you have a different boyfriend/girlfriend every 2-3 weeks, they will, too. You must walk the walk and it may be the hardest thing to do on the list.
11. You can't run your life on feelings: The sign of a mature emotional person is someone who is under control most of the time. It is all right to be extremely happy, it is okay to cry, it is okay to be mad, but if you are hitting all these emotions on a regular basis (daily) expect to be unhappy. Also, expect to teach your children that is acceptable behavior imprisoning them to a life of emotional unhappiness.
I believe that these are great guidelines to being a good parent. Also, making you a relatively happy person. It may be something that helps you, it may not, but it is something that I will work towards on a daily basis to try be the best parent I can be.
