What do children expect?

Answer 1

In addition to the basic human needs of nutritional food, proper shelter, clean water, and readily available healthcare, developmental monitoring and evaluations, and preventive healthcare, children have many needs. It is an understanding of these needs, and one's ability to provide them, that should be primary in the decision to raise a child. Children need parents/guardians with parenting skills.

Children need a guardian or a parent to guide them and care for them. They need love and to learn how to love. They need nurturing with loving physical hugs, touch, and bonding beginning in infancy. They need discipline and structure (but not corporal punishment). They need routines. They need activity, lots of physical activity. They need play, joy, and fun. They need chores for development of good work ethics. They need socialization with peers. Many believe they need pets after a responsible age. They need good role models, since they learn by observation at very young ages (much of it by the age of 3).

They need mental activity and mental stimulation to help form a lifelong love of learning and mental capability. They need formal education. They need to be taught by trained and educated teachers with full involvement of their parent(s)/guardians to support their education. They need to learn to read and to love to read. They need basic math skills and to learn how to manage money. They need an understanding of basic science and health information.

They need adults with them who realize that they are teaching their children every moment of the day by their actions and by every word spoken to them or within their hearing. Refuse to be bad examples that would teach them hate, racism, bigotry, intolerance, improper anger responses and anger management, violence, foul language, disrespect of others, disrespect of property, insecurity, self-hate, cruelty to animals, worry, indifference, altered self-images, bullying, dangerous behavior, etc. Do not introduce these ugly parts of human nature to your children through your own behavior or the behavior of others to whom you entrust them or expose them.