Better Parenting Today

By Ann Hughes

Better Parenting Today outlines the responsibilities parents have to help our children in these perilous times. It explains the importance of taking responsibility as parents in several important areas. Children need guidance, love and support in the world today. They are bombarded with many influences and some are very counter productive to their mental, physical and emotional well being. Parents need to step up to the responsibility of protecting, directing and guiding their children against all the influences that are hurting children today. By observing the crime and tragic things happening in our world among the youth, we realize that we must take a stand against these influences and help and protect our children. It is important that we teach them about morality and healthy lifestyles. We must accept the responsibility of parenting to effect the future of society and our world. We must be an advocate and guide to the world’s greatest asset, our children. Better Parenting Today shows parents how they can do this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ann Hughes
• Release date: Mar 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301215072

Ann Hughes

About the Author Ann has always loved to read and write. From an early age she loved getting lost in a novel. She has been an educator and writer for over twenty years. She loves to write in several genres including poetry,songs,fiction,screenplays, children’s plays, inspirational/spiritual, and non fiction. Her most recent book, “Better Parenting Today ” has just been published. She is the mother of five children and seven grandchildren. She lives with her husband, three cats, three horses, and a dog, in Bluffdale Utah.Her other interests include composing on the piano and the guitar, traveling,film-making,horses,cats, and thinking. You can visit her on her blog “Aimhighbooksann”.or her Email at [e-mail]

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Better Parenting Today

Ann Hughes

Copyright 2013 Ann Hughes

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There are no real names in this book. All real names have been changed. Any resemblance to real names or people is purely coincidental.

-The most important thing we can do as parents is love our children.The second most important thing we can do is teach them how to love themselves and love others-

Chapter I

The Responsibility of Being a parent

Being a good parent is one of the most important accomplishments in life. Good parents help create a healthy and strong society with productive and healthy citizens. Sadly, not enough emphasis is put on how important it is to be a good parent.. My experience as a teacher for more than twenty five years and a mother of five children for longer than that has helped me learn a lot about good and bad parenting. I have also been married for thirty years and have learned a lot about relationships and what works and what doesn’t work. Parenting is a very hard thing to do. It can be the most rewarding and yet the most frustrating and heart breaking thing anyone can undertake. We have to have a license to drive, to hunt and fish, to own a gun and to get married but there is no requirement for someone to be a parent. It should require a license or at least some training before embarking on such an important endeavor . Being a parent is one of the most important responsibilities anyone can undertake and has the most far reaching effects for generations to come .

Good parents are needed and extremely necessary in the world. No one is perfect and people don’t have to be perfect to be parents. We will all make mistakes along the way but a parent that is more prepared for the undertaking of parenthood and has taken the responsibility seriously is on the right track. Unfortunately too many parents are on the wrong track.

Television today gives families the wrong idea about what healthy families should look like. Some families begin to think that these TV families are a good example. Many of the television family programs show a lot of dysfunction and alternative lifestyles that a lot of families across America do not represent. Some of the older family shows were healthy and showed commitment and love in the family relationships. Leave it To Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Family Ties, even Alf and Home Improvement showed loving families with good life skills and values as part of the makeup of the family. There was a recent AOL news report that one of the actors didn’t want to be on the show Two and A Half Men any longer because he thought it was filthy. He went on to say that he was very troubled by the negative effects on the brain of some of the anti-moral programs on television. Unfortunately there are not enough role models and healthy family relationships to learn from any more in the media. If you let television raise your children today, don’t be surprised if they come out of it with anti-moral and dysfunctional lives. The term for family TV today is dysfunction.

Most parents love their children and want the best for them but unfortunately in our society today if a parent is not pro-active as a parent, the child will be influenced by many destructive things to the child’s psyche and character. Many children today seem to be floating on sea without morals. They are being influenced by the lack of morality in our society.

A parent needs to realize that they are the role model for their child. There have been students in the schools whose parents have allowed them to have tattoos and piercings that are inappropriate at a young age.. A mother in one of my fifth grade classes came in with posts all around her mouth, her tongue and in her eyebrows. She was over weight and her teeth were seriously decayed. Her child also had her lip tongue and eyebrow pierced and was severely over-weight. This mother was seriously harming her child socially but seemed oblivious to that fact. The child had a very difficult time being in front of other students and was absent whenever she needed to do a presentation.. She felt too self-conscious.. Why would a mother sentence her child to be socially ostracized by others and feel so uncomfortable and out of place in a social setting? Modeling healthy lifestyles and behavior is so important to a child. The parent is often the only role model a child has and so it is important to be a positive role model.

My daughter and I were having a discussion about her generation and I said that I thought they would be known as the Tattoo Generation. I have wondered what has happened in society that people are choosing to mutilate and harm their bodies as they do today. It can start young with parents that have tatoos and give their children the idea that tatoos are cool by allowing them to have tatoos that wash off. Later though it can be a form of masochism and self-mutilation. Tattoos are painful and permanent.This masochistic need to put things all over their body and piercings everywhere speaks for itself. It is a form of self mutilation akin to cutting. The prisons are full of people with tattoos all over their body who are very angry at society and have committed serious crimes that have landed them in prison. Often these tattoos have very derogatory and racist meanings. I have seen very attractive boys and girls become very unattractive and offensive to look at after piercing and tattooing their bodies everywhere.