Life comes with many challenges and risks. That goes the same for entering parenthood. Becoming a parent comes with challenges that are sometimes uncontrollable. While others are the result of controllable mistakes that can ultimately affect your child’s mental health in a bad way.
Parenting is like being on a rollercoaster — you might be happy and doing alright at first, but there will come a time when you might make mistakes that create more damage than good. Wanting a good life for your child is everything a parent would want, however, there are times that you might be pushing them to a line that you don’t want to cross. On many occasions, parents may be unaware of this line, so we’ve listed the top 5 parenting mistakes you might be doing.
Invalidating Their Emotions
Our first parenting mistake is when you invalidate your child’s feelings. Invalidating your child’s feelings may result in insecurity and uncertainty about their feelings. Your child will, later on, have difficulties having a healthy emotional state. In two circumstances, your child would either have heightened and intensified emotions or become numb to emotion.
By invalidating their emotions, you miss the opportunity to let them learn how to manage their emotions. Nonetheless, having your emotions be invalidated is traumatic, especially for a child that does not yet know how to manage their emotions. And just because YOU think that what they’re feeling isn’t “important” does not mean it’s not important to them.
Let your child speak their emotions and help them to manage them properly.
Always “Saving” Them
As parents, you don’t want to watch your children struggle or suffer through hard challenges in their life. By “saving” them from failure, they become too reliant on you and will not learn how to fight for themselves later on in life.
Experiencing failure is a big part of success. If children don’t learn the lesson that came with their failure, they’ll never be able to learn to work hard and persevere throughout lifes’ challenges. You can’t always have your child feel success because they’ll turn into egotistical adults who can’t handle failure.
Expecting Them to Be “Perfect”
It’s expected that parents want their children to aim for big goals in life and be the best in everything they do. It’s okay to feel that, but expecting your child to be “perfect” is where it can go wrong. Setting the bar too high can result in your child having confidence and self-esteem problems when they get older.
Invading Their Personal Space
Children, like adults and teenagers, hate when you invade their personal space without consent. It’s best to always ask consent when you want to hug them. This will teach them about consent and will know about boundaries. This will also help them to voice out their emotions to you, so you’ll know if someone is making them uncomfortable.
Pushing Them To Achieve YOUR Dreams
One of the biggest parent mistakes is pushing your children to achieve your dream or the dreams you’ve set up for them even if they don’t want to. Although your child may have better resources and facilities today does not mean that you should push them to achieve something you couldn’t, especially if they have dreams of their own.
Every person is different, just like your child is different from you. Molding them to be exactly like you by teaching them to like the things you like will take away their chance to do what makes them happy. By doing this, you’ll be putting too much pressure on their shoulders which will affect their mental health. This will also change how they look at you as a parent.
Final Thoughts
Every child is different, but all of them are precious. Parenting can be hard and this means that you’ll be making mistakes along the way. But making mistakes is normal for any human being.
But even if you do make mistakes, make sure to address them properly to avoid affecting your child’s mental health in a bad way.
