Children – are they safe with us?

Children need nurturing that encourages development, guarantees their survival, and safeguards them from harm (including physical and sexual abuse). All children have a right to feel secure, but young children, who often lack the tools necessary to avoid danger on their own, have particularly pressing safety demands. Instead, children under eighteen depend on their parents and other primary caregivers at home and in the community to make decisions on their behalf to ensure their safety and well-being.

At the most fundamental level, children need care that reflects a variety of emotional and physiological safeguards essential for meeting normative requirements for growth and physical development, such as healthy weight and receipt of needed vaccines. To ensure that children develop into healthy adults, providing them with care that fosters good emotional health and well-being is essential. This includes helping them develop a healthy sense of self, the capacity to deal with stressful circumstances, control their emotions, face their fears, and accept setbacks and failures.

Young children rely heavily on their parents and other caregivers for help with emotional regulation, coping, and behaviour management. They needed to offer up words of encouragement, respect, and love, all the while instilling a feeling of safety. The danger of internalizing behaviours, such as those linked with anxiety and depression, which may hinder children's adjustment and ability to function successfully at home, at school, and in the community, is reduced when parents provide emotional and moral support.

Extreme anxiety, helplessness, despair, apathy, melancholy, and withdrawal are indications of emotional problems identified in young children who do not get enough parental care. When it comes to raising children, we often succeed, but there are also times when our efforts fail. The line between doing what's best for your child and pushing them in a route that may harm their mental health is thin. Parents often say things like "all is for the best" when this can be psychologically damaging to their children, and they may not even realize it.

• Assessing your kid in comparison to others - Our child's anxiety and stress levels will rise if we continually compare them to other kids. When kids worry about disappointing their parents, it's usually because they haven't figured out how to satisfy them. If kids start to think that everyone else is better than they are, it may be damaging to their sense of self-worth. We must understand that every single child is unique in their way. Characteristically, they do not share the same qualities and flaws and grow and mature at the same rates.

• Punishing a child - The use of physical punishment, such as slapping or spanking, is not an effective method for altering a child's behaviour. The same principle applies when a child is insulted or humiliated in front of others. Harsh verbal and physical punishments are ineffective and harmful to the child's physical and mental health in the long run. As a kind of discipline, "time outs" may be helpful. If your kid becomes angry and hits his playmate, you should take him or her to a time-out area so that he or she can calm themselves. Use phrases like "no punching" and describe what they did wrong. Again, if your kid has been advised to put the toys in place but is still refusing, you might try taking them away for the day calmly and patiently.

• Parental fights in front of children - Children exposed to domestic abuse throughout their formative years are more likely to become insecure adults with low self-esteem. Experiencing parents arguing physically or verbally in front of a child may cause extreme mental pain and lead to early anxiety and other mental health problems in children. Conflicts and arguments are inevitable aspects of marital life; there is simply no way around it. Therefore, we as parents must exercise caution while addressing interpersonal disputes in front of our children.

• Overburdening the child - Every parent wants the best for their children and wants them to excel in all aspects of life. In their quest for greatness, parents often overlook the possibility that they may be doing more harm than good to their children. It is essential that you, as parents, understand how much stress a kid can endure healthily. If you want your children to be successful, you must create an atmosphere favourable to success and be by their side every step. We must be cautious not to overburden our children with our dreams and goals.

Children aren't only meant to follow in their parent's footsteps but to build their routes in life and pursue them with all their energy and passion. All we can do as parents are support them as they discover who they are and where they want to go. To do this, we must equip them with both a solid foundation to develop and the freedom to fly. Us parents must understand that our children are not here to do what we want, think as we do, or become who we want them to be. They are not here to make us feel better about ourselves.

Does this mean parents must not expect much from their children? No, but we should work on helping our children develop healthy relationships with others, confidence in their abilities, and hope for the future. For their children to flourish in life, parents must patiently encourage them to test the limits of their skills and grow as individuals in any sector they choose to focus on.