Parents play an important role in shaping their children for the future. Giving them the best childhood ensures that they live a healthier and more positive life but when they have a traumatic life experience, it could ruin them for life.

“Once bitten twice shy,” an old proverb which means that when you have a bitter experience in life, you tend to hesitate before doing the same thing and it leaves a permanent scar on your head. It’s the same thing with kids. When they have a traumatic childhood or witness something life-changing, the impact is long-lasting.

Ensuring your children have a good environment while growing is essential for their mental health and for their future. Having a good bond with your children is good but being too involved or not involved at all can also ruin their lives.

For kids, their parents are their heroes, the persons they look up to the most and whose approvals mean the world to them. Criticizing your kids is good if it is constructive and done to a limit. But when you start criticizing your kids for every little thing they do, it starts to hamper their self-esteem and shatter their self-confidence and they start loathing themselves. They start to feel as if they are not good enough and their whole life they will work only to seek people’s approval rather than believing in themselves and their talent. These kids will lack confidence when they grow up. Even in adulthood, they will only feel good about themselves only when someone else approves them.  The nail in the head to ruin your kids’ life is necessarily criticizing and comparing them to someone else.  Comparing in our society is a trend that has been going on for centuries. Sometimes it feels like comparing is a parent’s favorite job. They will say, “Oh look at so and so’s son or daughter, look how well they are doing and look at you.” I think we all have heard this at some point in our lives and even our parents’ have heard it in some point in their lives. But when your over do it, it does affect your children’s self-esteem and confidence.

Parents want what’s best for their children and they think they know what is best for them as well. So they tell their children the path to take, the clothes to wear, or the dreams to follow.  Putting pressure on your children and making them do what you want them to do will only create issues between you and them. Parents sometimes get so focused that they don’t listen to what their kids want and children not wanting to disappoint their parents suppress their own goals to follow their parents. What parents need to understand is that children has their own abilities and they learn at their own pace. Criticizing them and comparing them to someone else do not make them better at doing things, they only make the situation worse. You cannot live your dreams through your kids and putting too much pressure on them will lead to them to distance themselves from you. When children feel restrained and feel they have no freedom, they tend to rebel and make bad decisions that ruin their life. And some even take it as far as to commit suicide. Ask your child what she wants to do with her life but do not set her path by yourself. Be the person who will come to her aid when she feels lost. Create an environment whereby they feel safe to confide in you rather than be scared to disappoint you and hide things from you.

 A child only gets one childhood and parents need to make the most out of it by filling it with happy memories. But that is not possible when the atmosphere is dangerous for the child. As children we all have occasionally been scolded or mildly punished by our parents but when a child is assaulted every day for no reason it causes serious problems. Physical assault and violence have a haunting effect on children and it stays with them throughout their lives. If the child is a victim of physical assault, they have a hard time coping with being close to people and develop trust issue.  Problems between parents also disturb a child’s childhood. If the parents are always bickering at home, it creates a difficult atmosphere for kids to grow up in. Sometimes an amicable divorce is better than having parents who fight all the time. A disturbed home affects children’s mental health and in result it also affects their performance in school and their socializing skills. Children can shut out everybody, which might lead to depression or their making wrong choices in life. Seeing parents fight all the time creates an idea in children’s head that they are better left alone and from a wrong concept about marriage and long-term relationship.

A happy childhood leads a child to live a better and healthier life with a positive mindset, and helps her to have a strong bond with her parents.