The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Parents

Does raising children befuddle you? Are you overly concerned with making mistakes in your parenting? Then you need to learn how to become an ineffective parent. By incorporating these easy-to-implement habits into your parenting repertoire, you will soon become more ineffective and more stressed in child rearing.

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Here are the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Parents.

The first habit is to read about parenting more than practicing parenting. Make sure you consult one, two or five dozen lengthy books on child rearing, but don’t apply what you read. Make sure the books offer divergent views, so that you will have a broad range of parenting axioms at your fingertips but not a clear way to implement those ideas.

The second habit is to chuck your commonsense out of the window. That’s right, child rearing is so complicated, so unwieldy that you can’t possibly make heads or tails of it on your own. Whenever your commonsense tells you do something relating to parenting, ignore it and do nothing.

The third habit is to remember that raising kids is for only for the child’s sake. Don’t think about raising kids for the family or the community or the world at large. Only focus on developing the child as an individual. That’s the best way to raise a child.

The fourth habit is to act as if raising kids is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Let’s face it, it’s harder than climbing Mount Everest, or planning a military action or running the country. Whatever the task, raising kids is harder. Whatever the event or moment or life experience, parenting is 10, 20 or 30 times harder. It’s hard, dirty, thankless work, period.

The fifth habit is to spend all of your free time with your kids or doing something for your children. Highly ineffective parents never have anytime to themselves, because they are always serving their children’s needs by making sure the kids are entertained and chauffeured to sports practice and school events.

The sixth habit is to let your children be the decision makers in the family. Let your children guide all the decisions, from meals to vacation spots. Don’t lead, but instead follow them. Don’t presume to make choices for them, but instead allow them to pick everything for the entire family.

The seventh habit is to do everything, no matter how small, for your children. From homework to tying their shoes, don’t let your children lift a finger for themselves. After all, they are simply not capable of doing anything for themselves. Don’t assign them chores—they’ve got enough on their plate with soccer practice, piano lessons and schoolwork.

By following these 7 habits of highly ineffective parents, your child rearing will become more stressful, more complicated and less fun all around. But if for some strange reason, these habits aren’t quite what you had in mind, tune in on Thursday when I will share the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Parents.

Until next time,

Sarah