SINGLE "PARENT" AND GOOD PARENTING

Tyically, a single parent in any environment or context is seen as an individual who raises a child's or children's welfare or well being. On the other hand, while a single parent is burdened with the essential of raising well nourished and properly brought up children, good parenting can become a formidable task, enabling the child or children to thrive. Hence, good Parenting is essentially the practice of fostering a secure, loving and respectful relationship that allows children to succeed in life. The ingredients of good Parenting and it's key characteristics tended to centre on Parents' unconditional love for their children. This unconditional love entails building a strong, trusting bond and creating a sense of safety for a child. In the context of this book, good Parenting involves offering positive forms of discipline; children need direction rather than punishment to learn. It also requires setting out clear, suitable, and easily understood boundaries for the children with consistency. Essentially, good Parenting would require parents to model proper behaviour by demonstrating values such as kindness Honesty, integrity and emotional stability, which enable children to learn more and better from those actions then from words. Encouraging respectful communication in children by engaging them in active listening, validating their feelings and treating them with respect parents would expect could constitute good Parenting. It behoves parents to be willing to apologise and readily amend the relationship after making mistakes, which could foster strong, healthy, cordial parent child relationships. The challenges faced by a single parent could jeopardise the ability to raise thriving children as expected; nonetheless, good Parenting is not exclusive to two parent families but requires tenacity to adhere to its tenets. Modern times are creating a society with greater influence from a variety of technological advancement on child rearing. Further-more, Parenting in this age has gone beyond the exclusive rights of biological parents; it has also become a joint responsibility and duty of the state through the enactment of polices and regulations. However, it has become important to recognise that society would benefit from raising children to thrive and shape it according to their chosen expectations and outcomes. Therefore, good Parenting in these modern times would beget a good society if Parenting today remember and endeavours. To nature children who will be adults and parents of tomorrow, this could be a good legacy for the next generation to follow and raise a better society. However, today's adults, the parents, have with hindsight, gained from their experience of good parenting that enables them to lead a thriving existing in this modern time, and have the responsibility and duty to pass on what they gained in terms of good parenting to their children. Blending traditional parenting methods with modern parenting may require shifting the strengths of traditional ways of raising children and the modern approach to child rearing. But the final aim has been to raise food children through good parenting methods; the community and society at large would reap the benefits of the kind of children they manage to raise.