How Overparenting Affects Your Child

Nurturing the child is a major point of concern as it helps to develop your child's personality and prepares him/her to survive in the competitive world. Proper handling of your kid will make him/her stay disciplined and behave in a socially acceptable way. Parents are role models for their kids and their first teachers too.

Likewise, the atmosphere in the house also plays an important role in proper bringing up of the child. Parents, today, are aware about various parenting techniques but somehow do not follow them while raising their children.

They tend to think that those techniques are pretty strict for a child. The types of overparenting include over protectiveness, over involvement and over indulgence.

• When parents are overprotective, they keep a watch on the smallest activity of the child, restricting his/her freedom. They are over conscious about the child's safety and keep calling the child (if a teenager) on his/her cell frequently to keep a follow-up of the current situation.

• Parents who are over involved do not have their own space as such. They assume that fulfilling their child's needs and giving him/her a secured future is the ultimate aim of their life.
• Over indulging parents have the habit of giving unnecessary cautionary instructions during each task as if the child won't be able to do anything on his/her own.

The possibilities when parenting becomes overparenting are:

• The first child in the family
• The first girl/boy child in the family
• The only child in the family

These are some of the conventional reasons that result in overparenting. There are some other reasons as well that amount to such parenting style because of individual behavioral traits in the parents.

• The first reason would be, parents struggling to be perfect parents. To avoid the guilt of not being good parents, makes them more anxious and extra caring.

• The second reason would be their own deprived childhood. They don't want their kids to go through the same situations as they did.

• The third reason would be lack of faith in the child. They have a feeling that their child won't be able to handle a situation on his/her own or complete any given task in time.
• The fourth reason would be that they are so anxious about the safety of their child that they do not allow their child to do anything independently.

If parents begin to behave in an irregular manner, children often respond in a troublesome way. If a child is able to make out the difference between the behavior of his/her parents and other child's parents, he/she does not like it and gets irritated.

Some major effects of overparenting are listed down and they can prove to be a threat in the child's progress.

• The child is not allowed to experience various situations. He/she is hardly exposed to any circumstance, which can prepare him/her for further challenging situations.
• As the parents try to be perfectionists, many children suffer from stressful schedule not only academically, but also in their extra curricular activities. 

They are forced to join so many extra classes, regardless of their interest in those activities.

• The child gets a feeling that the world is a dangerous place and they won't be able to survive without the support of their parents. This develops a kind of negative attitude in the child.

• If the child is provided with extra care at home, he/she expects the same outside. When the child does not receive similar care, he/she tends to get depressed immediately.

• Overparenting also inculcates spoiled behavior in some children. If parents keep fulfilling all the unreasonable demands of the child, he/she thinks that it is right and continue to demand whatever they want. Fulfilling the demands will have short-term effects, i.e., it will keep the child happy for just a few days but, spoil him/her for lifetime.

• You can initiate by gradually taking back your extra support in any task.
• Try to give suggestions rather than instructions. Give ideas and techniques to achieve something instead of doing it yourself.
• Expose them to new challenges to build in them the confidence to face any complicated situation.

In conclusion, responsive or effective parenting as opposed to overparenting will be the best way to be perfect parents for your children. By following the above suggestions, you can give your child a bright and secure future.