Back in the spring I completed a training to become a facilitator for the ACT (adults and children together) Raising Safe Kids Program. I’m in the process of recruiting parents for my first 8 week session. Parenting classes have a negative stigma attached to them, but how does anyone really learn how to be a parent? This course focuses on a different topic each week* and all I keep thinking as I’m preparing to facilitate my first program is that this comes pretty close to teaching the foundation for parenting.
But back to the previous questions, “How do you learn how to be a parent?” I am a strong believer that we learn how to parent from our parents first and foremost. You learn and choose what you want to do and what you don’t want to do, based on what they did or didn’t do while raising you. Secondly you learn from the parents around you, relatives, friends, even strangers you witness parenting. You learn by observation, just as our children learn how to behave by observing you and everyone around them. Parenting is also learned through trial and error.
But think for a minute, what if the only thing you learned from your parents was to provide food, shelter and clothing? Now, what if the only reason you learned that from them is because that’s what they didn’t provide for you? How do you teach a person who was neglected or abused as a child how to be the parent they, as a child, needed?
* Week 1: Understanding Your Child’s Behavior
Week 2: Young Children’s Exposure to Violence
Week 3: Understanding and Controlling Parents’ Anger
Week 4: Understanding and Helping Angry Children
Week 5: Children and Electronic Media
Week 5: Discipline and Parenting Styles
Week 6: Discipline and Positive Behaviors
Week 7: Overcoming Barriers to Change and Making it Last
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