Parental Guidance & Counselling

A major fault in most parenting advice is the assumption that one parenting strategy will be fit for all children. Another assumption is that children are all alike and that parents are all alike. But children’s unique temperaments will make a difference in how they learn and socialise; how they respond to discipline; learn self-control; reason and make decisions about life. According to the literature, parental temperament influences the actual parenting style, regardless of which theoretical model the parent follows.

 

A prerequisite for an emotionally healthy parent-child relationship is that parents must know and understand their children. According to the literature, parents often lack perception and insight with regards to the handling of their children. When parents do not acknowledge and understand their child’s uniquely inborn needs, conflict may arise within the parent-child relationship, which may lead to behavioural problems in these children. This unacceptable behaviour can be seen as the child’s way of regulating his or her own needs and inadequate parenting can contribute to behavioural problems in children.

 

Parents regard (sometimes unconsciously) their children as carbon copies of themselves. Children’s individuality gets lost, their unique behaviour patterns are not accepted and their unique needs are not accommodated by the parents. The extent to which a child’s temperament fits within that child’s environment is described with the concept goodness or poorness of fit. When children’s natural temperament styles or processes fit within the requirements, needs and expectations of the parents, positive interaction and adjustment (good fit) is expected, but when children’s temperaments and natural processes clash with the expectations, needs and requirements of their parents, negative interaction (poor fit) occurs, which results in conflict within the parent-child relationship.

For parents to fully understand and recognise their child’s emotional needs, knowledge of the child’s temperament is required. Knowledge of temperaments leads to parents having a better understanding of their children’s behaviour and fewer frustrations are experienced. This may lead to more effective parent-child interaction. A personal interpretation from experience within the practice is that if parents do understand their children’s temperaments, this contributes towards parents adjusting the expectations they have of their children according to the children’s unique processes. Parents will then have a better knowledge of when to be firm and when to be more supportive.