Sion Goff
Parenting is much more than training; everyone agrees. We see parents do their best to mold us the way they think better for us.
In this endeavor, parents sometimes miss or overdo many things, which according to our perception or the norms of the society, isn’t excellent or ideal to do.
And the overall parenting gets labeled as bad parenting. But, is bad parenting merely a perception of the children or others in the society or the signs of bad parenting are universally accepted?
Let’s discuss this in detail today. Because, if the nursery has a hostile environment, the seedling will never grow into a shadowy fruit-bearing tree.
Table of Contents
What is bad parenting?
Bad parenting is the series of actions of the parents, including their rude behavior with children, which forfeits their liberty, their choices, their wants their need for love or any other conduct that destroys their future.
Signs of Bad Parenting (Good Parenting vs. Bad Parenting)
What is a toxic parent?
How do your deal with a toxic mother?
Well, it’s difficult to summarize all the behaviors that can be termed as the signs of bad parenting. The symptoms may not be highly objective that fits in every culture.
But we have tried to jot down a few of the signs of bad parenting, which may be applied in any society or culture. The list is not exhaustive but still covers most of them.
1. Even Little Mistake Gets Severe Reaction
Your child has poured water on the floor, and you start foaming from the mouth, and the worse thing is it’s not the first time you’re doing it. Every time your child makes a mistake, you rebuke him/her severely.
2. Corporal Punishment Is Daily Activity
No matter the mistake of your children is incurring loss or not, you are in the habit of spanking your child. This behavior is quite common among less-educated parents because they believe that they should treat their children the way their parents had treated them.
3. Misdirected Anger and Frustration
Father gets embarrassed in the office by his boss for being unable to complete the project, and when he comes home, subject his children to thrashing or shouting for their acts that he used to ignore in the past.
4. Comparing Your Children with Others
No two humans are the same in this world. When you constantly criticize your child for obtaining grades lower than his or her classmates, or when every day you mention that your neighbor’s son has started a job and yours is staying idle at home, you’re playing a bad role as a parent.
5. Not Showing Affection
Every child needs his parent’s love and affection, not by words merely but by show of emotions as well.
When you come home in the evening and don’t hug, kiss, or even smile at your child, you are creating a gap between you and your children. And this gap once develops, can never be bridged in the future.
6. Bad Relationship with Your Life Partner
All the affection, love, caring, and ethical behavior goes in vain if you are not on good terms with your partner.
There are many examples where mum is so good with her children but always argues with her husband. As a result, the children don’t share their problems with either of them, for the fear that it may not cause an issue between their parents.
7. You Don’t Care About Children’s Problems
You are called at the Parents Teacher Meeting (PTM), but like before, you made a lame excuse of being extremely busy.
PTMs have always helped to know your child’s problems, which otherwise isn’t possible.
Or your child told you about being bullied at school, but you make a fake promise as always to call your school teacher and didn’t.
8. No Appreciation Whatsoever
Your child is back from school someday and jumping for joy because he has stood first in the class, or he’s bought something out of his part-time income, and showing it to you with extreme happiness.
But, shockingly for him, you showed no sign of joy. Instead, you listened and got back to watching the soccer match the next moment.
9. Helicopter Parenting
What is helicopter parenting, and why is it bad?
The human mind needs to work and practice as other parts of the body do, for it can nourish properly.
For young ages, parents need to be caring and cooperative with their children to help them understand things and solve problems.
But when caring increases beyond the needs, it becomes a bane.
When for every problem your children face, you come in between and resolve yourself, you’re literally harming their decision-making ability.
With this attitude of yours, their self-efficacy lowers, and fear surrounds them whenever they are required to make a new decision.
10. You Insult Your Child before Others
To reprimand your child before his siblings does not make that much impact on the children
But when you rebuke them before friends, relatives, or strangers, it affects a lot.
Parents often do this under the impression that self-respect pertains to elders only, which is wrong.
11. Setting Poor Examples
Forbidding your children from smoking while smoking yourself, is something they would adopt for sure, irrespective of the fact you disallowed him several times.
Similarly, discouraging others from getting higher education in front of your child while forcing him to obtain good grades won’t work at all.
12. Creating a Negative Environment
Some parents repent on their past too much. They don’t realize that their children hearing this would lose hope for the future, which their schools are direly trying to build.
Most of the time, it’s because of the mistakes parents did in the past or bad luck they have faced so far.
13. Keeping Your Children Aloof From Others
Pushing your children away from other children for the fear that it would impact your children negatively is another bad thing you might do as a parent.
For instance, you don’t like your child mixing with his friends, or you discourage him by setting time limits, without realizing that such isolation would make them unable to compete in their professional life.
14. You Label Your Children with Demeaning Names
Name-calling your children before others the worst thing you could as a parent. When you call names, you identify the shortcoming in him that won’t be revealed otherwise.
For instance:
Calling him Fatso, Loser, etc. The impact of name-calling is much severe than you expect. The worst of which is becoming a rebel whenever he becomes powerful enough to do so.
15. You Don’t Spend Time with Your Children
Let’s suppose you don’t do either of the wrong things as a parent, described above. But still, you can’t be called a good parent if you do not spend time with your children.
What is good time-spending? Being together at dining tables or dropping them at school are not considered time-spending.
Instead, playing games with him, telling tales of the past while cradling him, or becoming a child yourself while playing with him.
Also, laughing when they laugh, going out for picnic frequently, discussing current affairs when they grow old, etc. These are things if you don’t do, there’s a serious question mark on your parenthood.
16. You Force Things against Your Children’s Will or Capacity
Your son wants to opt for medical sciences, but as a Civil Engineer, you want him to choose Civil Engineering as a program.
Or your child is extremely poor in Mathematics, but you’re preparing him for the next Math competition.
These things can’t make your child competent, but he or she will look for the chance where he can escape your coercion.
17. You Are Too Lenient (Permissive Parenting)
What permissive parenting is bad?
If you are a pushover for your children for their not-so-good demands, you’re not a good parent.
Because when you’re allowing your children to do whatever crazy thing they want to do, you’re not giving them liberty; instead, you’re playing with their future.
Like when your child wants to smoke weed, or he wants to join a crazy anti-government protest, or he demands the food that’s detrimental to his health, but you still do not forbid him.
Another example is when you are at a store for shopping, and your mischievous child roams around the floor and makes the mess, but you ignore it.
18. Not paying importance To Your Children
If you absolutely do not care where your child goes, what he eats, what people he mixes with, you’re at wrong.
Despite knowing your kid is obese, you let him eat fast food quite often. You may call it liberty, but that’s devastating. Such children join a bad company where they are left far behind than their classmates or children of similar age.
Fun Fact
There’s a bad parenting movie, named Bad Parents, about the parents who are over-obsessed with their school kids soccer game, and even resort to offer sexual favors to the trainer to get special attention for their kids.
What are the Effects of Bad parenting? (Impacts of Bad Parenting)
When you fail to fulfill your duty as a responsible or a good parent, your child suffers it, and some time suffers hard.
Let’s look at how bad parenting affects the child.
1. Your Children Will Become Depressed
According to the CDC USA, 4.5 million children had diagnosed behavioral problems; 4.4 million had anxiety, and 1.9 million had diagnosed depression in the year 2019.
A research concluded that certain dimensions for parenting were closely associated with childhood depression.
Continuous rebuking or not being friendly with your children will make them fall depressed soon. The depression will then seriously hinder their ability to do things efficiently. For every new thing, they will have a fear of uncertainty.
Sometimes the depression may go too far, like causing sleep disorders, fatigue, and low energy, crying about small things, or thoughts of suicide or death even.
2. Rebellious Behavior
The more you suppress your child’s feelings or become unfriendly with him, the more likely will he become a rebel. The rebellion in him is expressed in either of the following forms:
- Keeping things secret from the parents, or
- Preferring loneliness, or
- Sudden mood change, or
- Dislikes over parents choices, despite the fact he used to like the same in the past, etc
3. Inability to meet the challenges (Poor Performance)
Another severe outcome of poor parenting is the inability of the children to perform well, be it academia or their professional life. In the school, the indications are low grades, struggling to understand the concepts of the topics or inability to take part in extra-curricular activities.
In the professional life, the inability to meet deadlines, committing of errors much frequently, poor coordination with team members, staying at the same designation for years, an impediment to any functional or dysfunctional change in the organization are few of the effects of bad parenting.
4. Your Child Becomes Aggressive
A study concluded that children’s aggression is directly related to how well their parents control or manage their aggression.
Tantrum or Temper Tantrum is the condition associated with those children who exhibit their emotional distress through stubbornness, aggression, crying, violence, and hitting other children.
When children see their parents being aggressive on every matter, either related to them or someone else, the same behavior automatically transfers to their minds.
The moms or dads who handle the children roughly have their children behaving roughly and aggressively too, which most of the time causes embarrassment for such parents themselves.
5. Anti-social Behavior
When you hit your child for little reasons, or spank him frequently, he starts believing that corporal punishment is as acceptable as other things. So, when he grows old, he implements the same to others. And then, hitting or slapping remains a small thing, rather stabbing, torturing, and even killing becomes his norm.
Here, people often ask if ODD is caused by bad parenting. Yes, ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and OCD are more likely to catch children due to bad parenting. So, when a child shows symptoms of ODD, it’s up to his parents to help him recover soon or worsen it even with their behavior with him.
Fun Fact
Bad parenting is being used as a metaphor by most organizations today. For example, “Why Journalism is like really Bad Parenting, and how can we fix it?” (Ashoka.org)
Bad parenting Solution: How to recover from bad parenting?
It’s acceptable that you haven’t been a good parent for whatever reason, like stress at the office, not being on good terms with your life partner, or you didn’t realize ever that such behavior destroys your children’s future.
But there must be a solution: the sooner, the better. The good thing is you have realized how bad your children have been affected, and now it’s time you change yourself.
Therefore, we suggest the following measures which can help you bring up your child way better than you might think.
1. Be Your Child’s Friend (Express Your Love)
Initially, it seems a bit difficult as getting closer to your child may be perceived by him as another act of thrashing. But, still, ask how his day at school was? What was funny in those hours? Did he enjoy his lunch at school?
Once he starts telling his story, show full interest, express emotions like laughing at the funny things and raising eye-brows for bad things, etc. Get him some cool gifts that will keep them physically active than busying them with mobiles, such as a UFO drone or a wall climbing remote car. It may look strange but will work like magic, and you’ll see after some time he’ll be in friendship with you.
You’ll Also Love: Interactive Kids’ Toys
2. No More Shouting, Scolding or Spanking
Although it’s difficult for you to change suddenly, try not to yell even if the child has committed blunder. Shouting for the right thing even causes fear in the children, which keeps echoing in their minds for years to come.
So, avoid shouting and scolding your child. Instead, make them understand in a friendly and mild tone that particular thing is not appropriate for him or her.
3. Support Denials with Reasons
Suppose your child is insisting on ice cream while he is already suffering from sore throat. Here, instead of saying plain no, tell him that his sore throat is the only reason for not getting him the ice cream, and once he recovers, he’ll get it immediately.
You may replace the things he is insisting on with the ones that are helpful yet attractive like magic LED drawing board.
4. Give Your Child Space
Don’t try to do everything yourself for your child. Give him space where he can play on his own by using his own mind, with losses even but a lot of learning. Failure is not considered a failure if you have learned something out of it.
The rule here is that a sapling does not grow under a tree. If you want your children to be a better decision-maker and successful person in the future, just train them, listen if needed, and let them work with full liberty. It applies if your child is doing some kind of business, a domestic chore, or even at studies.
5. Set a Good Example
The children tend to get influenced by their parents more than any other person. If parents are coward, aggressive, or less caring, so will become the children.
Therefore, do the good things yourself first, which you often ask your children to do. Like going to bed on time, behaving nicely with others, etc. and avoid things you don’t like your children to adopt.
Bad Parenting Comic
Bad Parenting Memes
The Bottom Line!
Your children are your asset. If you bring up your children well, you’ll see them succeed in all walks of life. On the other hand, your bad parenting moments will not only mar their future but will see a sore relationship between you and them.
Nevertheless, if you notice any of the above-mentioned signs in you or you observe strange behavior in your kids, the solution is there. Still, you can improve your relationship with your children before it’s too late, and call yourself a proud mother or father.