Safety – Parenting Competency # 10

While safety is in the forefront of many parents’ minds, and paying attention to children’s safety and monitoring their activities is important, safety falls at the bottom of the top ten parenting competencies.

In fact, there is good and bad news about focusing on children’s safety. While safety skills contribute to children’s health and well being overall, if parents are overly focused on the safety of their children it tends to decrease the quality of the parent child relationship and decrease children’s happiness.

Safety is one of those things where it is important to find the correct balance. Children need to be protected but also need to have enough freedom and autonomy to learn from their own mistakes.

Parents also need to be aware that safety is an area where what they do is more important than what they say. In a recent study, children reported they were generally following their parents’ safety rules. However, they planned to act the way their parents were acting when they became adults, even if their parents were doing things they considered unsafe.