Smart Population Foundation believes there are three key things that make parenting such a challenge:

1. Juggling risk and safety

Each day parents perform a juggling act between their need to protect a child's safety and the child's need to take risks (which is essential to build problem solving skills and self-confidence).

2. Time and self-control

Being an effective parent requires a significant investment of quality time in order to meet a child's physical, emotional and cognitive needs.

It also takes massive self-control to stay calm and focused when a child is not behaving the way you want or need her to behave. Likewise, the control required to meet a child's emotional needs when your heart is breaking because of a divorce or separation is nothing more than colossal.

3. That love thing

Sometimes love gets in the way of rational thought and plenty of parents who act out of love can often hamper their child's natural learning and discovery process. Simple examples of this include:

• Wanting to pick up a baby whenever it cries even though all the baby might want is to fall asleep undisturbed.
• Solving a child’s problems for them instead of letting them learn how to solve their own problems.
• Changing your standards and giving in to whining ― this will send mixed and confused messages to your child, they may stop trusting you and will certainly have learned how to manipulate you ― there is no surer way of conditioning them to whine to get what they want, even though they don't want to be annoying.
• Overprotecting them, wanting to prevent a child’s hurt at all cost (wrapping them in cotton wool.)
• Pushing your child to be competitive with other children (or finishing their homework) because you want them to appear successful.

On the flip side, to be loved is a feeling that everybody wants, most of the time without even realising it, beginning at birth and lasting for life. Every child deserves to feel loved and needed.

The Raising Children project is designed to provide parents with access to information to help them best manage these challenges according to their specific circumstances and within their means.