From A Childs Point Of View: Fill & Download for Free

In my experience in dealing with a number of parenting issues, young adult and teenage issues in my career span as a Psychologist and Educator, I would like to highlight the following scenarios that really damage the personality of your growing son. Parents please read, please get educated.RESPECT: Respect your teenage sons as individuals, respect and value their opinions no matter how silly or absurd you may think they sound from your point of view. Respect their decisions, and their decision making skills. I know of a teenager who lacked confidence in himself, feared making the simplest of decisions and had a hesitant personality because he was constantly criticized and nagged by his parents over the silliest of issues. Parents you may not even realize when your habit of giving advice and protecting turns into nagging and over-protecting to the point of damaging your son’s personality.PLEASE GIVE HIM HIS SPACE! i understand your concerns of losing your son to bad company or other worse scenarios, and hence your constant need to peep into his world all the time or fairly regularly. You need to understand that you had to instill values and discipline in him while he was still a child and when it was easier to mold his personality by using love, guidance, and discipline. Once he is a teenager, your constant interfering in his life is only going to widen the gap between the two of you, because he begins to look at you as someone who doesn't trust him, who doesn't let him live his life, who doesn't allow him his space. And he is going to resent you for this. Try becoming his mentor and friend. Show him through genuine actions that you are someone who he could come to for guidance, and support. Once he learns to trust you, parenting him in his teenager years would become far easier, you wouldn’t even need to monitor his activities all the time.TEACH HIM TO BE INDEPENDENT: Along with the above points, i can not stress this enough. Teach your son important life skills. Skills that could keep him functioning absolutely fine even during moments when he is all by himself and even when you are not around. Lets face it parents, you are not going to always be around. Teach him how to manage his finances at the earliest age possible, teach him how he could handle his relationships (that includes his girl friends, wife, his mother, his sister, father, his extended family, and friends), teach him to be confident, ALLOW HIM TO MAKE MISTAKES, AND LEARN FROM THOSE MISTAKES, DON’T PROTECT HIM ALL THE TIME! teach him to do his laundry, make his own food, keep his house clean etc. these are just basic life skills, that would help him survive under any circumstances.DEVELOP HIS CHARACTER: teach your son kindness, humility, respect for his parents and others, teach him chivalry, teach him to be fearless by encouraging him to make his own decisions, expose him to the real world gently.Enjoy your child and his company. Nurture him with love, respect, empathy and kindness. Often parents forget that the difficult teenage years of their son don’t last. What is needed is mindful parenting, thoughtfulness and consideration while raising your son through his teens to turn him into a Man that you would be proud of. But there is hard work, A lot of Hard work involved from your end, before he turns into the Man that you could be proud of.Thank you for all the upvotes, i am glad my answer resonates with many. I hope this answer does make a difference for the ones who need it.

“Have to” is an odd question. Instead, let’s look at the choices that woman made, and the choices her partner made: all of them legal in the US.For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the woman and the man both consented to sex. Non-consenting sex would require a wholly different answer, involving criminal prosecution making one partner unavailable for providing for the child.Therefore, both partners chose sex, knowing that heterosexual sex can lead to pregnancy. (If one of them, or both, didn’t know it, again the consent is murky and probably criminal.)Both partners had a say in contraception for their own body. Each partner had some biological assistance for preventing pregnancy available to them. Either only one availed themselves of that opportunity (which leads to higher risk of pregnancy) or contraception failed for both partners, or neither bothered to avoid pregnancy. All equal so far.Both partners had an opportunity to discuss the consequences of pregnancy and what they want to happen if it occurred. Both had the opportunity to decide if they trusted and liked the other person’s set of expectations. This is the only murky area in consenting sex: if lying about your intentions (or discovering yourself to feel otherwise once the actual choice is necessary) puts the other partner at risk for having to deal with either an abortion or child support against resistance. The possibility of a stranger lying is much higher than a good friend, so on the other hand, the choice to lie or accept one is part of the choices made in stranger sex (another good reason for each person to take care of contraception for themselves, if they don’t like the idea of supporting a baby, and the country expects it as part of their choice).In short, all decisions on an act where a child is predictably a possible outcome with the wrong choices belong to both parents. Each is responsible for their own choices; if their partner doesn’t want a condom and spermicide gel, for example, the choice is to continue toward heterosexual sex or not, knowing that sex will be more likely to beget a child. Anything else is just an excuse. Unlike food or shelter, there is no absolute requirement to have sex for survival; indeed, more recent anthropological theory places this drive on groups, not individuals.In short, choices are equal because each partner has bodily autonomy and a right to make parallel decisions. They are not precisely the same choices, but in a world where biology varies, they come as close as possible to a liberal egalitarian ideal: people able to consent have the right to consent or refuse to what happens to their body. In short, autonomy (or “liberty,” as US forebears called it) is central to American concepts. In this tradition, by definition, “fairness” can be determined by equal access to choices, not by outcome.If pregnancy occurs, the rules are that bodily autonomy continues for the woman, whose body is now occupied, and she can decide to let it be occupied or take her body back. The man does not have this choice at this point in a sexual relationship, because the principle is bodily autonomy, not “ownership.” Neither owns the fetus, nor the child once it is born. Rights inhere to your body, not over another human. The man’s choice began when he decided whether he would be sexual with someone. Presumably it is informed consent, in that he knows that generally, heterosexual sex can lead to a child, and that the state decides what accountability will occur if it does. All adults in a society set up by these standards should understand their accountability in advance.With these realities guiding the decision, it’s clear that what happens after coitus is not completely the man or woman’s choice. The state decides — through law and the courts - who is responsible for the baby’s survival, and to what extent. Obviously, many women and men take their own ethical responsibility seriously, and make decisions which make active intervention of the law irrelevant.If you don’t like the law, you should organize to change it, or somehow resist it. There are many other possible views — for example, that babies belong to the state, and the state should nurture them, or that male partners who don’t want to pay for the baby’s life should be able to sign away any parental rights (in something the emotional equivalent of giving it up for adoption). Or the state could move in new and imaginative directions. Since the tradition and custom has been that men “own” the child and are responsible for it, made long ago when sex was supposed to be accompanied by legal marriage, there certainly need to be new theoretical discussions about the nature of the relationship between each biological parent and the child.But right now, I think that, while it does require individuals to financially care for a child which one or both don’t want, the law is totally fair from a gendered point of view because the choices made to engender a child are equivalent. A man has the right to refuse to take that risk; once he has, complaining is much like jumping out of an airplane, discovering he has no parachute, and concluding that it’s unfair because other people packed parachutes and don’t have the same problem.

“To begin with, I think it's important to point out that the word 'spanking' is a euphemism for violent behavior. Yes, violence. That very thing many parents who spank will prevent their kids from seeing on TV. With all the fuss being made over the negative influence of children viewing abstract violence on video games, TV, and movies, one might get the impression that fantasy/abstract violence is worse for kids than experiencing the actual thing.The easiest way to address this issue of spanking is to take a look at the 'pros and cons' involved.PROS:1. Spanking is expedient - it quickly delivers a powerful message in terms of behavior modification. Parents who lack the patience to teach through cognitive learning can use acts of physical aggression as a teaching method.2. There's no need to waste a lot of time with verbal communication. From our earliest days, primal grunts, gestures, and clubbings have served us well.3. Parents can release pent-up anger & frustration and not have to worry about physical retribution. This 'venting' of anger and frustration through spanking might be viewed by parents as therapeutic in the absence of a household pet to kick-around. (The problem here is that a recent study has found that aggressive behavior leads to increases in aggressive behavior rather than less*).4. It gives parents a sense of tradition, not unlike shooting guns in the air on the 4th of July. A sense of nostalgia can also be provided, as parents are able to hark back to the good old days when they themselves were whacked around by parents who wanted to show how much they cared.5. Parents who confuse fear with respect can feel a sense of accomplishment. Children cringing in fearful subservience serve to provide parents with a sense of power and control that they may find otherwise lacking in their lives.6. Parents can feel they are preparing their kids for 'that tough world out there'. The logic here assumes that the child may grow up to one day find themselves in a job where the boss hits them when they make a mistake.CONS:1. Violence towards children causes a degree of trauma that carries with it a high risk in the development of psychopathology. The ranks of the mentally ill, substance addicted, violent criminals, and sexual deviates, are filled with individuals who were the victims of violent, but not necessarily legally abusive parents. *2. Children learn to strikeout when their sensibilities are offended. It stands to reason that the best way to teach children how to be violent is to have them experience violence first-hand from the most influential teacher they'll ever have. Not only does spanking make violence a part of a child's reality, but it can also provide a child with the anger to trigger violent behavior; because when parents fail to break the mind and spirit of a child through the ultimate act of rejection, anger is often the result.3. The nurturing role of the parent is put at risk. If the parent does not compensate for the hateful acts of violence toward their children with copious amounts of love and caring, there exists a strong possibility of the children losing trust, and becoming alienated from the parent. As a result, offending behavior on the part of the children only increases, thereby turning the spankings into a totally counter-productive measure, and a continuing or escalating source of acrimony.4. Spanking runs the risk of becoming criminal behavior. Parents who employ corporal punishment as a means of discipline take the risk of crossing the line into legal child-abuse when under high levels of stress. This is how most cases of child-abuse occur.5. Children may one-day forget the trauma of the violence inflicted upon them, but they never forget the acts of violence. Parents who treat their children in a violent manner usually fail to consider that, in one way or another, there will be a heavy price to pay as a consequence. In the very least, violence will act to diminish the quality of any relationship.6. Children learn to abstain from certain unacceptable behaviors so long as the parent is present. Some children will even find themselves more prone to these unacceptable behaviors in the absence of the parent through retribution or experiencing the 'forbidden fruit is the sweetest' phenomena. The reason? Through spanking, children become dependent on external controls (fear) for behavior rather than developing internal controls (self-discipline/conscience) through teaching with gentle, patient guidance.7. It seems nothing more than common sense to submit that forms of sadomasochistic behavior can stem from childhood spankings. Because the buttocks are an erogenous zone pain can become associated with sexual stimulation through spankings. Pain, control, and dominance can also become associated with loving behavior as a result of corporal punishment, i. e. , 'I hit you because I love you. '8. This above mentioned convoluted definition of love can also set the stage for the child developing a tolerance for future abusive relationships. . . more commonly in the case of women.9. Children who are not afforded dignity or treated in a respectful manner have a difficult time learning what those things are all about. Why else would so many children grow up with the notion that dignity equates with demeanor and respect equates with fear. The following is an excellent explanation of how this occurs:CHILDREN LEARN WHAT THEY LIVEIf a childlives with criticism,he learns to condemn.If a childlives with hostility,he learns to fight.If a childlives with ridicule,he learns to be shy.If a childlives with shame,he learns to feel guilty.If a childlives with tolerance,he learns to be patient.If a childlives with encouragement,he learns confidence.If a childlives with praise,he learns to appreciate.If a childlives with fairness,he learns justice.If a childlives with security,he learns to have faith.If a childlives with approval,he learns to like himself.If a childlives with acceptance and friendship,he learns to find love in the world.Dorothy Law Nolte (1963*)--------------------------------------------------------------As we evolve as a society we have to keep in mind that historically there was a time when it was acceptable to legally own other people; a time when the mentally ill were generally considered to be possessed by evil spirits; a time when gentlemen legally shot each other in duels; a time when public hangings were attended as a family outing complete with picnic basket; a time when public floggings were considered acceptable punishment; a time when it was a gentleman's agreement that husbands should not beat their wives with a switch that was 'bigger-round than your thumb' (which became known as 'the rule of thumb'); and there was a time when there were no laws against parents severely beating their children (killing children was unacceptable, of course, but an occasional accidental maiming as a result of disciplinary measures was tolerated).It's not hard to see where I'm headed here. . . we no longer allow the punishment of flogging; we no longer allow wives to be hit, and we no longer allow prisoners to be struck as a routine punishment. The time has come for us to yet further our level of social sophistication by coming to a general agreement that any degree of physical punishment used against children is as socially unacceptable and repugnant as those other violent behaviors we have chosen to put behind us.As you've seen, there are no actual 'pros' to spanking unless one is suffering an emotionally stunted authoritarian mindset.Not only are the great majority of Child Abuse cases involving physical injury associated with acts of spanking, but every professional organization in North America concerned with the care and treatment of children, has taken a public stance against spanking as an ill-advised practice.”Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9395732