Parents with Respect

This week we watched a great video that listed four qualities that are important to parenting: responsibility, cooperation, respect, and courage.  It will help them to learn how to respond to opportunities and challenges, work with others, reciprocate respect, and to "have a willingness or ability to face challenges/experiences to an unknown problem" (Brother Williams).  To use an active parenting style, the parents must choose to be a team with the children, while upholding authority respectively.  We should want to become parents because they will be the ones who take care of the world, we want the best for our future generations even if it does not influence us directly.  We learned that children cooperate with parents much better when they are given choices, included in decision making (such as consequences of disobeying the commitments made to the parents), and are treated in all situations with love instead of anger and hostility.  We hope the best for our children, that they may have even better lives than the ones we lived.  In parenting as a loving and respectful team, the children will be better prepared to "survive and thrive in the world they are going to live in". What I hope some people understand is that parenting can be just as rewarding for the parents as it can for the children.  Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?  Parents can learn how to live unselfishly and more wholesome by raising children because they want to be a good example.  When parenting, you gain a greater understanding of unconditional love and commitment. You are refined as a person with guided with love from your Heavenly Father and spouse.  An old saying my elementary school overused is, "there is no I in team".  I think it most certainly can be applied to the family because it requires that we work together and must put our family's needs above our own selfish needs.  A wonderful blessing from parenting with respect comes from the reciprocated love and enjoyment of spending time together, which ironically gives every parent what they really want- greater cooperation from their children.