PA R E N T I N G
Parenting, a Challenge: Why
Pakistanis need to Revamp
their Parenting Style!
“T
he price of greatness is responsibility”, a succinct dictum by Sir Winston Churchill fittingly
and cogently explicates the august commissioning to one of the most challenging and rewarding
enterprises of ‘becoming a parent’. A huge responsibility
often taken for granted though, the stature of being a
parent — assiduously divine and sublime circumstance
in itself by all means — relegates certain atypical and
imperative liabilities and obligations in concurrence.
Heightened sense of answerability, an astute cognizance, intelligence, intuitive understanding, candor,
compassion, strength, wisdom, spirituality, perseverance, and hard work may be named as a few rudiments
of the greatest challenge of teaching, rearing, and training of children today thus though. Parents’ role is conventionally compared to that of gardeners planting and
tending saplings and offshoots, to shepherds tending
flocks or to nurses; and from certain religious viewpoint
God’s appoints for protecting the innocent souls and
their spiritual welfare. Parents are judged for, in child
raising, on assorted distinctive appraisals: being realistic
or unrealistic about their hopes for a child; open-or-narrow minded in the interests they allow or foster, or lessons they instill; supportive or hindering of a child’s development; deftly guiding or incessantly pushing a child
in certain directions. They are also extolled for being attentive, responsive, patient, devoted, and generally responsible, alternatively blamed for being deficient in
these respects or for ‘smothering’ children being too permissive or indulgent of their misconduct. Whereas the
importance of parenting is a topic of contemporary sci-
entific and psychological research, an international imperative is also embedded in the UN Convention of
Rights of the Child stating that, “The child should be fully
prepared to live an individual life in society… in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and
solidarity” and that ‘the family is responsible for guaranteeing the child’s rights’. Protection (environment, safe
from physical and emotional harm); good health (safe
water, hygiene); proper nutrition, stimulation (opportunities to explore, express curiosity, engage in problem
solving); language development and above all interaction with and attachment to caring parents, are some
basic children entitlements. Raising and caring the
young ones was the duty of human beings, before history was even history. Parenting has evolved through a
string of successive and overlapping phases, from a
seventeenth century outlook of children as ‘adults-intraining’ to the early nineteenth century em