Three Central Tasks of Parenting

Three Central tasks of parenting are to teach children values, behaviors and expectations of a society and culture. There are different approaches to educating children. One approach is to help children find safe activities. For example, during the summer parents can take children to museums and find summer sports for their children to participate in. There are swimming teams to be a part of and art classes and there are always programs to participate in at the local library.

Another approach to educating children is to provide children with a sense of empowerment and acceptable safe choices. Both a sense of empowerment and safe acceptable choices protects the child and fosters responsibility. For example, giving a child a task such as unloading the dishwasher gives a child a sense of empowerment because it's a task they can accomplish on their own. When a parent gives a child acceptable, safe choices such as you can either wear sunscreen or not go to the pool, this teaches a child about sun safety and protects a child from the harm of sunburn etc. that the sun can cause and it creates responsibility of sun safety.

There a variety of ways to reduce the amount of unnecessary guidance and discipline that can happen while raising a child. One is to make sure activities are developmentally appropriate. This can be accomplished by providing a variety of activities. Activities should be revised based on the unique learning needs of the child which involves observes learning styles, social interactions, and comfort with the activity. Environments need to be evaluated for safety hazards, lack of interesting and challenging opportunities and elements that can cause discipline problems as a result of design.

To address challenges the balanced approach to guidance helps children become socialized to the culture they grow up in. The balanced approach consists of respect for the child's emotional needs, respect for individual differences, respect for power of development and respect for self. A differentiated approach can also help children become socialized. The differentiated approach is where expectations, activities, tasks and outcomes are changed by the parent depending on the child's abilities, learning style, and overall development. Behaviorism is an important type of learning.  When the two categories of behaviorism- rewards and punishment- are used it becomes a guiding technique to help parents teach their children between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Ways to reduce potential discipline problems include  matching  learning activities and expectations with how children learn and being sensitive to individual learning styles, temperaments and pace of learning.

When parents use these techniques when disciplining their children it will help parents keep discipline use appropriate and from giving a consequence that may not go along with the offense.