How Bad Parenting Affects A Child

You may be a good parent at heart but if you carry out bad parenting actions, you are failing your kids and worse, setting them up for a possible lifetime of failure. So much of your child’s future happiness depends on how well you raise your kids today. The basics of good parenting are easy to understand and implement.

There are three main areas where you can engage in bad parenting – abuse of your child, ignoring your child and engaging in conflict and argument with your child. Some parents lack skills, some do not care and some are simply swamped by other problems and fail their kids as a result.

But there is something every parent needs to know and that is that bad parenting does have consequences for their child. And it can all happen in the first three years of the life of your child. Simple things like reading to your child and playing with them when young. Children who miss out on these things are more likely to have trouble relating to other children when pre-school and school times begin.

Of course, teachers can help children who lack social skills but a busy room of active children can often mean special time for an individual is not possible.

From pre-school, children who have suffered from bad parenting move to a school where they are more likely to fall behind. Their ability to communicate with teachers and other students is not as strong as it could be. Their schoolwork falls behind.

Then begins the domino effect. A child who is struggling with the academic studies is far more likely to drop out of school. Children who drop out are far more likely to break the law and become a troubled teen or be susceptible to being an at risk youth. It’s a path that is only too easy to trace. Bad parenting for a baby and toddler ending a dozen or more years hence with a teenager being arrested or becoming addicted to drugs or life or crime.

One of the clear facts is that bad parenting, while more likely to occur within broken homes and with parents who are poor and unemployed, can occur at all levels of society. There are many examples of children from wealthy homes who have failed at school and gone off the rails.

The lesson clearly being that good parenting has so many possible benefits that can last a lifetime whereas the opposite is true. Bad parenting handicaps a child and puts them under far more pressure in their quest to succeed. Chances of a child becoming an at-risk youth are far greater if they endure bad parenting in their childhood.

Of course, there are children who suffer from bad parenting who go on to make a real success of their lives and there are kids who get wonderful parenting from caring parents only to see their child fall by the wayside. But the evidence is clear. Good parenting gives the child by far the better chance of being successful and living a happy and healthy life.