DEALING WITH PARENTING STRESS; MOVING FROM PASSION TO POWER. part 1.
I Often ask caregivers ; teachers, teen coach, parents, and faith based youth handlers on what informed their strong decision and desire to want to work around the child; expected the answer has always been yes roundly coined in a phrase; ‘I am just passionate about kids, I love them around me…… I hear this and other emotional responses just to suggest that being around kids is natural to us. That’s cool though.
You see the pursuit of passion alone to impact one’s world effectively is never the problem but how effective is the flame of passion as to the positive delivery on the job of parenting at hand. Every parent/adult is laced with the passion which is developed overtime to train kids to succeed in life, right from conception; to when the child is born, up till when he/she grows to eighteen. The primary responsibility of feeding, total child safety, shelter, quality education, and mentoring, is exclusively placed on shoulder of parents in this part of the world. No parents want to joke with this onerous task. Albeit permit me to expound briefly how passion can damage and make ineffective of our good intention in parenting if left untrained.
Passion as defined by Wikipedia is a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling desire for someone or something.
By this definition; passion has no boundary, being passionate about something or someone which is boundless can be sometimes dangerous because from its chilling soft ground creeps out impatience, close-mindedness, unreceptive, hostility, unteachable, greed, anger, retaliation, cruelty, suspicion, jealousy, brute forces , selfishness, and sometimes unreasoning impulses.
Passion is a moving consuming fire , the flame wouldn’t stop until it reduces itself to a heap of revolting ashes in the lives of parents and kids.
Passion deprives parents of their peace by making them suspect every move of children, it conditions parents mind to either cave and give in to the tantrum of the child or pounce on the child in the open just because of the bystanders effect and not necessarily to provide positive response to the issue at hand and will sometimes blindfold you to see the problem beyond the child.
The untrained flame of Passion breeds doubt and uncertainty in your relationship with kids such that it will make you feel worthless as a parent before the bystanders and you’d have to deal with the dirty looks, snide remarks, or other derisive comments of other adults thereby heaping more pressure on you, so also is your ability to seek relevant knowledge diminishes as the number of distractions increases.
Passion saps you creativity needed to support the child to overcome certain excesses with a view to helping nurture them and provide positive role models.
From scientific perspective, passion and emotion do not have the capacity to understand consequences and backlash of its wierd action. This is why we still see some kids appear unreceptive, cold, and hostile to their parents in spite of their positive disposition towards making them turn out better.
I see passionate mothers and fathers who easily operate solely from the realm of the deeper EMOTION, and by attendant staggering burdens this has placed on them many parents are on the brink of throwing the towel for they to have found parenting as more of a job and less of a joy. This is what untrained passion does to you. It has a penchant for bringing out the worst in parents.
Passion veils parents from seeing today’s children as different from children of 40 years ago with reference to divergent circumstances, experiences, and perspectives. Many parents have lost their children to outsiders due to the eruption of passion and have proportionately developed strain on the job.
The stronger your passion is , the deeper and fiercer is your temptation towards selfishness, egocentric, and entitlement mentality. But to prevent one from drifting to the region of appalling helplessness one must know when to draw a line between passion and wisdom; a person of passion is most eager to put others right , but a person of wisdom first puts himself right. My candid advice to parents.
The entire facade of passion will crumble before any parent who latches on emotion to parent a child for the reason that passionate parent seeks to put kids right, but wisdom demands that passion is not enough to raise today’s kids, but by methodically allow our passion to go through the refining fire of processes to achieve positive engagement of kids……….
Part 2 in hours….