Parenting Lessons: Get a Mentor for Your Child
According to Brownielocks.com, January is National Mentoring Month. Mentoring can be such a positive influence on any child, but especially a child dealing with mental illness. My own positive experience with a mentor has led me to a career of helping other children. Mentoring can hold many benefits for your child. Check out how I benefited from having a mentor.
Mentors Can Encourage
My very first after-school counselor, Valerie, was my first mentor. She took the time out of her busy college schedule to show me how special I was. I was a very quiet, shy pre-teen who was picked on a lot at school. Valerie encouraged me to see the good things about myself - that I was valuable, important and unique. She also encouraged me to step out of my own shell and try new things.
Mentors Can Teach
Valerie was a good teacher. While she may have been studying to be a social worker, she taught me simple things. How to be generous, how to be kind and how to be giving to others. Valerie also taught me that being quiet and shy was more than okay. It was great.
Mentors Can Inspire
I loved my experience being mentored by Valerie so much that I was inspired to become an after-school counselor a couple of years later. I wanted to do for other kids what Valerie did for me. I wanted other kids to feel as special and wonderful as I did. I became an after-school counselor and stayed on for 8 years. As I grew in experience, my confidence grew also. I found that I was capable, smart and comfortable with helping other kids. This comfort led me to work with other children in need of a caring adult to show them how special they are. My work was inspired by this wonderful mentoring relationship.
Mentors can do so much for a kid. Being mentored opened me up to my passion of helping children and parents understand each other better. Get a mentor for your child. Who knows what magic can happen?
APA Reference
Zalamar, H.
(2014, January 14). Parenting Lessons: Get a Mentor for Your Child, HealthyPlace. Retrieved
on 2024, November 2 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/parentingchildwithmentalillness/2014/01/parenting-lessons-get-a-mentor-for-your-child
Author: Heiddi Zalamar, LMHC, MA
Interesting and challenging issue! Parenting as difficult and complex task requires numerous emotional, educational, material, psychosocial and sociocultural performances from parents, in order to nurture in appropriate way their loved children. These and many others necessities harden the role and place of parent in family social network system. On the other hand, to be mentor to our children exhibits overloaded obligation with positive and useful performances. By me, to work out successfully the role of adviser, it ought to avoid verbal advices instead to express they by educational and good daily interpersonal relationship. The life is most efficacy adviser. It should to be good model for our children, by our pro-social behave in personal ,professional, family and social network system. Each rigid, monotone, violent and reductive parenting approach is damaging and counterproductive one. I think, good parenting underlines efficacious monitor role. Let's be honest, open and compassionate with our children, in order to prevent any misunderstanding on complex relationship parent-children everywhere and any life circumstances.