Infants and children are often said to be the hope for tomorrow’s society. Their growth and development for full world occupancy is highly dependent on how the society essentially prepares them from an early stage. Parents have a great responsibility in understanding children, preparing them and also equipping them with the relevant skills they need to navigate life.
Families affect the development of infants and young children through built relationships over time. Couples that respect each other and solve their issues amicably provide a good environment for the growth of infants and children. Young children are very observant and highly capture information at an early age. Therefore, when families are there for their children from an early age and when they engage in peaceful resolution of issues around the home, the children also learn for example to be peaceful in the future. According to Benson & Haith (2010), during infancy, children that witness their caregivers being abused through violence tend to view the world as a place that is unsafe. They view adults as people who are dangerous. In the long run, the children tend to have an attachment with their primary caregiver and lose interest with the people that inflicted pain on their caregivers. It is sad since the pain inflictors might be persons that are connected to infants biologically like their fathers. The infants will develop a liking for the mother or caregiver and shy away from their fathers.
There exists different forms of parenting styles. The style chosen by parents or caregivers has a great impact on children during infancy. The parenting styles include but are not limited to; peer parenting, positive parenting, and democratic parenting. Positive parenting is a style which emulates positive aspects of a child during infancy. Parents look at the positive aspects of children even when instilling discipline. For instance, when children do wrong things, the parents focus more on what should have been done right and not what was done wrong. The parents reward positive traits and behaviors. In this parenting style, reward is the main factor. These can either be intangible rewards such as praise or tangible rewards. Children are taught why they should do things the right way or why they should act right. The parents tend to focus less on the negative aspects.
According to Davis (2016), parents should be free with their children. They ought to be friendly with the kids especially during infancy as this will end up in the creation of a strong rapport with the children and will make parenting generally easier. In democratic parenting, children are usually given choices, and they are then held responsible for these choices. This is upheld even when the consequences are not pleasant. In this type of parenting, parents give children chores and then put forward some agreed consequences which are appropriate. However, sometimes democratic parenting when not used effectively because of lack of skills and knowledge on the part of the parents may lead to the emergence of manipulative and spoiled kids (Lofas 1998).
According to Lofas (1998), peer parenting is a type of parenting style where parents and children are equal. According to this model of parenting, the parents behave like peers to their children, and they compete for love and power. It is a dangerous form of parenting since parents lose an emotional attachment with children; relationships become a peer relationship, and not a parent to infant relationship. When parents adopt this style, it will come to a point where they will be seeking for attention from their children. As children grow with age and time, they will replace their parents as peers, with the introduction to new environments, for example, schools or social gatherings such as sports.
After analyzing the different parenting styles, I would recommend positive parenting style. I feel that the style is aimed at helping infants and children grow up with positivity around them. They will do the right things since they know importance and benefits of these things. In this style, children are given direction through love and positivity and not through threats and or coercion.
Early childhood education is an important stage of life. Here, children are for example taken to daycare facilities and nursery schools mainly to familiarize themselves with the education facilities present there and also for socialization with other kids. Most of the sessions in early education settings take few hours per day and unlike higher level education, children might not go for five days consecutively especially if they are younger than four years. The core purpose of early childhood education is to open up a child’s brain for socialization and education (Chilampikunnel, 2010). Early childhood education has a great impact on childhood cognitive development in that the children develop various cognitive skills, for example through socialization in and out of the classroom. Children are taught to be independent; their brains are prepared to handle a greater workload with time as they advance to other levels academically and socially. Through early childhood education, children are introduced to information first by being familiarized, for example with pictures and sounds. They are taught how to write, and the writing reveals what they see in pictures and what is captured in their brains. Laughter and quarrels that result from various interactions help the children to learn how to solve problems from an early age.
References
Benson, J. B., & Haith, M. M. (2010). Social and emotional development in infancy and early childhood. Amsterdam: Academic Press. Print.
Chilampikunnel, M. A. (2010). A manual for parents, teachers, and principals on early childhood education. Bloomington, Ind: XLibris. Print.
Davis, M. (2016). The Ultimate Tips on Parenting Styles for Raising Children. Eljays Publishing,
Lofas, J. (1998). Family rules: Helping stepfamilies and single parents build happy homes. New York: Kensington Books.
