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500 Words Essay On My Parents

We entered this world because of our parents. It is our parents who have given us life and we must learn to be pleased with it. I am grateful to my parents for everything they do for me. Through my parents essay, I wish to convey how valuable they are to me and how much I respect and admire them.

my parents essay

My Strength My Parents Essay

My parents are my strength who support me at every stage of life. I cannot imagine my life without them. My parents are like a guiding light who take me to the right path whenever I get lost.

My mother is a homemaker and she is the strongest woman I know. She helps me with my work and feeds me delicious foods . She was a teacher but left the job to take care of her children.

My mother makes many sacrifices for us that we are not even aware of. She always takes care of us and puts us before herself. She never wakes up late. Moreover, she is like a glue that binds us together as a family.

Parents are the strength and support system of their children. They carry with them so many responsibilities yet they never show it. We must be thankful to have parents in our lives as not everyone is lucky to have them.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

While my mother is always working at home, my father is the one who works outside. He is a kind human who always helps out my mother whenever he can. He is a loving man who helps out the needy too.

My father is a social person who interacts with our neighbours too. Moreover, he is an expert at maintaining his relationship with our relatives. My father works as a businessman and does a lot of hard work.

Even though he is a busy man, he always finds time for us. We spend our off days going to picnics or dinners. I admire my father for doing so much for us without any complaints.

He is a popular man in society as he is always there to help others. Whoever asks for his help, my father always helps them out. Therefore, he is a well-known man and a loving father whom I look up to.

Conclusion of My Parents Essay

I love both my parents with all my heart. They are kind people who have taught their children to be the same. Moreover, even when they have arguments, they always make up without letting it affect us. I aspire to become like my parents and achieve success in life with their blessings.

FAQ of My Parents Essay

Question 1: Why parents are important in our life?

Answer 1: Parents are the most precious gifts anyone can get. However, as not everyone has them, we must consider ourselves lucky if we do. They are the strength and support system of children and help them out always. Moreover, the parents train the children to overcome challenges and make the best decision for us.

Question 2: What do parents mean to us?

Answer 2: Parents mean different things to different people. To most of us, they are our source of happiness and protection. They are the ones who are the closest to us and understand our needs without having to say them out loud. Similarly, they love us unconditionally for who we are without any ifs and buts.

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National Academies Press: OpenBook

Parenting Matters: Supporting Parents of Children Ages 0-8 (2016)

Chapter: 1 introduction, 1 introduction.

Parents are among the most important people in the lives of young children. 1 From birth, children are learning and rely on mothers and fathers, as well as other caregivers acting in the parenting role, to protect and care for them and to chart a trajectory that promotes their overall well-being. While parents generally are filled with anticipation about their children’s unfolding personalities, many also lack knowledge about how best to provide for them. Becoming a parent is usually a welcomed event, but in some cases, parents’ lives are fraught with problems and uncertainty regarding their ability to ensure their child’s physical, emotional, or economic well-being.

At the same time, this study was fundamentally informed by recognition that the task of ensuring children’s healthy development does not rest solely with parents or families. It lies as well with governments and organizations at the local/community, state, and national levels that provide programs and services to support parents and families. Society benefits socially and economically from providing current and future generations of parents with the support they need to raise healthy and thriving children ( Karoly et al., 2005 ; Lee et al., 2015 ). In short, when parents and other caregivers are able to support young children, children’s lives are enriched, and society is advantaged by their contributions.

To ensure positive experiences for their children, parents draw on the resources of which they are aware or that are at their immediate disposal.

___________________

1 In this report, “parents” refers to the primary caregivers of young children in the home. In addition to biological and adoptive parents, main caregivers may include kinship (e.g., grandparents), foster, and other types of caregivers.

However, these resources may vary in number, availability, and quality at best, and at worst may be offered sporadically or not at all. Resources may be close at hand (e.g., family members), or they may be remote (e.g., government programs). They may be too expensive to access, or they may be substantively inadequate. Whether located in early childhood programs, school-based classrooms, well-child clinics, or family networks, support for parents of young children is critical to enhancing healthy early childhood experiences, promoting positive outcomes for children, and helping parents build strong relationships with their children (see Box 1-1 ).

The parent-child relationship that the parent described in Box 1-1 sought and continues to work toward is central to children’s growth and

development—to their social-emotional and cognitive functioning, school success, and mental and physical health. Experiences during early childhood affect children’s well-being over the course of their lives. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when children’s brains are developing rapidly and when nearly all of their experiences are created and shaped by their parents and by the positive or difficult circumstances in which the parents find themselves. Parents play a significant role in helping children build and refine their knowledge and skills, as well as their learning expectations, beliefs, goals, and coping strategies. Parents introduce children to the social world where they develop understandings of themselves and their place and value in society, understandings that influence their choices and experiences over the life course.

PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY

Over the past several decades, researchers have identified parenting-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices that are associated with improved developmental outcomes for children and around which parenting-related programs, policies, and messaging initiatives can be designed. However, consensus is lacking on the elements of parenting that are most important to promoting child well-being, and what is known about effective parenting has not always been adequately integrated across different service sectors to give all parents the information and support they need. Moreover, knowledge about effective parenting has not been effectively incorporated into policy, which has resulted in a lack of coordinated and targeted efforts aimed at supporting parents.

Several challenges to the implementation of effective parenting practices exist as well. One concerns the scope and complexity of hardships that influence parents’ use of knowledge, about effective parenting, including their ability to translate that knowledge into effective parenting practices and their access to and participation in evidence-based parenting-related programs and services. Many families in the United States are affected by such hardships, which include poverty, parental mental illness and substance use, and violence in the home. A second challenge is inadequate attention to identifying effective strategies for engaging and utilizing the strengths of fathers, discussed later in this chapter and elsewhere in this report. Even more limited is the understanding of how mothers, fathers, and other caregivers together promote their children’s development and analysis of the effects of fathers’ parenting on child outcomes. A third challenge is limited knowledge of exactly how culture and the direct effects of racial discrimination influence childrearing beliefs and practices or children’s development ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000 ). Despite acknowledgment of and attention to the importance of culture in

the field of developmental science, few studies have explored differences in parenting among demographic communities that vary in race and ethnicity, culture, and immigrant experience, among other factors, and the implications for children’s development.

In addition, the issue of poverty persists, with low-income working families being particularly vulnerable to policy and economic shifts. Although these families have benefited in recent years from the expansion of programs and policies aimed at supporting them (discussed further below), the number of children living in deep poverty has increased ( Sherman and Trisi, 2014 ). 2 Moreover, the portrait of America’s parents and children has changed over the past 50 years as a result of shifts in the numbers and origins of immigrants to the United States and in the nation’s racial, ethnic, and cultural composition ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ; Migration Policy Institute, 2016 ). Family structure also has grown increasingly diverse across class, race, and ethnicity, with fewer children now being raised in households with two married parents; more living with same-sex parents; and more living with kinship caregivers, such as grandparents, and in other household arrangements ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ). Lastly, parenting increasingly is being shaped by technology and greater access to information about parenting, some of which is not based in evidence and much of which is only now being studied closely.

The above changes in the nation’s demographic, economic, and technological landscape, discussed in greater detail below, have created new opportunities and challenges with respect to supporting parents of young children. Indeed, funding has increased for some programs designed to support children and families. At the state and federal levels, policy makers recently have funded new initiatives aimed at expanding early childhood education ( Barnett et al., 2015 ). Over the past several years, the number of states offering some form of publicly funded prekindergarten program has risen to 39, and after slight dips during the Great Recession of 2008, within-state funding of these programs has been increasing ( Barnett et al., 2015 ). Furthermore, the 2016 federal budget allocates about $750 million for state-based preschool development grants focused on improved access and better quality of care and an additional $1 billion for Head Start programs ( U.S. Department of Education, 2015 ; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015 ). The federal budget also includes additional funding for the expansion of early childhood home visiting programs ($15 billion over the next 10 years) and increased access to child care for low-income working families ($28 billion over 10 years) ( U.S. Department

2 Deep poverty is defined as household income that is 50 percent or more below the federal poverty level (FPL). In 2015, the FPL for a four-person household was $24,250 ( Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, 2015 ).

of Health and Human Services, 2015 ). Low-income children and families have been aided as well in recent years by increased economic support from government in the form of both cash benefits (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit) and noncash benefits (e.g., Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and millions of children and their families have moved out of poverty as a result ( Sherman and Trisi, 2014 ).

It is against this backdrop of need and opportunity that the Administration for Children and Families, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the U.S. Department of Education, the Foundation for Child Development, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) requested that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine empanel a committee to conduct a study to examine the state of the science with respect to parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices tied to positive parent-child interactions and child outcomes and strategies for supporting them among parents of young children ages 0-8. The purpose of this study was to provide a roadmap for the future of parenting and family support policies, practices, and research in the United States.

The statement of task for the Committee on Supporting the Parents of Young Children is presented in Box 1-2 . The committee was tasked with describing barriers to and facilitators for strengthening parenting capacity and parents’ participation and retention in salient programs and services. The committee was asked to assess the evidence and then make recommendations whose implementation would promote wide-scale adoption of effective strategies for enabling the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Given the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of the study task, the 18-member committee comprised individuals with an array of expertise, including child development, early childhood education, developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry, social work, family engagement research, pediatric medicine, public and health policy, health communications, implementation science, law, and economics (see Appendix D for biosketches of the committee members).

WHAT IS PARENTING?

Conceptions of who parents are and what constitute the best conditions for raising children vary widely. From classic anthropological and human development perspectives, parenting often is defined as a primary mechanism of socialization, that is, a primary means of training and preparing children to meet the demands of their environments and take advantage

of opportunities within those environments. As Bornstein (1991, p. 6) explains, the “particular and continuing task of parents and other caregivers is to enculturate children . . . to prepare them for socially accepted physical, economic, and psychological situations that are characteristic of the culture in which they are to survive and thrive.”

Attachment security is a central aspect of development that has been

defined as a child’s sense of confidence that the caregiver is there to meet his or her needs ( Main and Cassidy, 1988 ). All children develop attachments with their parents, but how parents interact with their young children, including the extent to which they respond appropriately and consistently to their children’s needs, particularly in times of distress, influences whether the attachment relationship that develops is secure or insecure. Young chil-

dren who are securely attached to their parents are provided a solid foundation for healthy development, including the establishment of strong peer relationships and the ability to empathize with others ( Bowlby, 1978 ; Chen et al., 2012 ; Holmes, 2006 ; Main and Cassidy, 1988 ; Murphy and Laible, 2013 ). Conversely, young children who do not become securely attached with a primary caregiver (e.g., as a result of maltreatment or separation) may develop insecure behaviors in childhood and potentially suffer other adverse outcomes over the life course, such as mental health disorders and disruption in other social and emotional domains ( Ainsworth and Bell, 1970 ; Bowlby, 2008 ; Schore, 2005 ).

More recently, developmental psychologists and economists have described parents as investing resources in their children in anticipation of promoting the children’s social, economic, and psychological well-being. Kalil and DeLeire (2004) characterize this promotion of children’s healthy development as taking two forms: (1) material, monetary, social, and psychological resources and (2) provision of support, guidance, warmth, and love. Bradley and Corwyn (2004) characterize the goals of these investments as helping children successfully regulate biological, cognitive, and social-emotional functioning.

Parents possess different levels and quality of access to knowledge that can guide the formation of their parenting attitudes and practices. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 , the parenting practices in which parents engage are influenced and informed by their knowledge, including facts and other information relevant to parenting, as well as skills gained through experience or education. Parenting practices also are influenced by attitudes, which in this context refer to parents’ viewpoints, perspectives, reactions, or settled ways of thinking with respect to the roles and importance of parents and parenting in children’s development, as well as parents’ responsibilities. Attitudes may be part of a set of beliefs shared within a cultural group and founded in common experiences, and they often direct the transformation of knowledge into practice.

Parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices are shaped, in part, by parents’ own experiences (including those from their own childhood) and circumstances; expectations and practices learned from others, such as family, friends, and other social networks; and beliefs transferred through cultural and social systems. Parenting also is shaped by the availability of supports within the larger community and provided by institutions, as well as by policies that affect the availability of supportive services.

Along with the multiple sources of parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices and their diversity among parents, it is important to acknowledge the diverse influences on the lives of children. While parents are central to children’ development, other influences, such as relatives, close family friends, teachers, community members, peers, and social institutions, also

contribute to children’s growth and development. Children themselves are perhaps the most essential contributors to their own development. Thus, the science of parenting is framed within the theoretical perspective that parenting unfolds in particular contexts; is embedded in a network of relationships within and outside of the family; and is fluid and continuous, changing over time as children and parents grow and develop.

In addition, it is important to recognize that parenting affects not only children but also parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents’ lives; generate stress or calm; compete for time with work or leisure; and create combinations of any number of emotions, including happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger.

STUDY CONTEXT

As attention to early childhood development has increased over the past 20 years, so, too, has attention to those who care for young children. A recent Institute of Medicine and National Research Council report on the early childhood workforce ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2015 ) illustrates the heightened focus not only on whether young children have opportunities to be exposed to healthy environments and supports but also on the people who provide those supports. Indeed, an important responsibility of parents is identifying those who will care for their children in their absence. Those individuals may include family members and others in parents’ immediate circle, but they increasingly include non-family members who provide care and education in formal and informal settings outside the home, such as schools and home daycare centers.

Throughout its deliberations, the committee considered several questions relevant to its charge: What knowledge and attitudes do parents of young children bring to the task of parenting? How are parents engaged with their young children, and how do the circumstances and behaviors of both parents and children influence the parent-child relationship? What types of support further enhance the natural resources and skills that parents bring to the parenting role? How do parents function and make use of their familial and community resources? What policies and resources at the local, state, and federal levels assist parents? What practices do they expect those resources to reinforce, and from what knowledge and attitudes are those practices derived? On whom or what do they rely in the absence of those resources? What serves as an incentive for participation in parenting programs? How are the issues of parenting different or the same across culture and race? What factors constrain parents’ positive relationships with their children, and what research is needed to advance agendas that can help parents sustain such relationships?

The committee also considered research in the field of neuroscience,

which further supports the foundational role of early experiences in healthy development, with effects across the life course ( Center on the Developing Child, 2007 ; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2009 ; World Health Organization, 2015 ). During early childhood, the brain undergoes a rapid development that lays the foundation for a child’s lifelong learning capacity and emotional and behavioral health (see Figure 1-1 ). This research has provided a more nuanced understanding of the importance of investments in early childhood and parenting. Moreover, advances in analyses of epigenetic effects on early brain development demonstrate consequences of parenting for neural development at the level of DNA, and suggest indirect consequences of family conditions such as poverty that operate on early child development, in part, through the epigenetic consequences of parenting ( Lipinia and Segretin, 2015 ).

This report comes at a time of flux in public policies aimed at supporting parents and their young children. The cost to parents of supporting their children’s healthy development (e.g., the cost of housing, health care, child care, and education) has increased at rates that in many cases have offset the improvements and increases provided for by public policies. As noted above, for example, the number of children living in deep poverty has grown since the mid-1990s ( Sherman and Trisi, 2014 ). While children represent approximately one-quarter of the country’s population, they make up 32 percent of all the country’s citizens who live in poverty ( Child Trends Databank, 2015a ). About one in every five children in the United States is now growing up in families with incomes below the poverty line, and 9 percent of children live in deep poverty (families with incomes below 50%

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of the poverty line) ( Child Trends Databank, 2015a ). The risk of growing up poor continues to be particularly high for children in female-headed households; in 2013, approximately 55 percent of children under age 6 in such households lived at or below the poverty threshold, compared with 10 percent of children in married couple families ( DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, 2014 ). Black and Hispanic children are more likely to live in deep poverty (18 and 13%, respectively) compared with Asian and white children (5% each) ( Child Trends Databank, 2015a ). Also noteworthy is that child care policy, including the recent increases in funding for low-income families, ties child care subsidies to employment. Unemployed parents out of school are not eligible, and job loss results in subsidy loss and, in turn, instability in child care arrangements for young children ( Ha et al., 2012 ).

As noted earlier, this report also comes at a time of rapid change in the demographic composition of the country. This change necessitates new understandings of the norms and values within and among groups, the ways in which recent immigrants transition to life in the United States, and the approaches used by diverse cultural and ethnic communities to engage their children during early childhood and utilize institutions that offer them support in carrying out that role. The United States now has the largest absolute number of immigrants in its history ( Grieco et al., 2012 ; Passel and Cohn, 2012 ; U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ), and the proportion of foreign-born residents today (13.1%) is nearly as high as it was at the turn of the 20th century ( National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015 ). As of 2014, 25 percent of children ages 0-5 in the United States had at least one immigrant parent, compared with 13.5 percent in 1990 ( Migration Policy Institute, 2016 ). 3 In many urban centers, such as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City, the majority of the student body of public schools is first- or second-generation immigrant children ( Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008 ).

Immigrants to the United States vary in their countries of origin, their reception in different communities, and the resources available to them. Researchers increasingly have called attention to the wide variation not only among but also within immigrant groups, including varying premigration histories, familiarity with U.S. institutions and culture, and childrearing

3 Shifting demographics in the United States have resulted in increased pressure for service providers to meet the needs of all children and families in a culturally sensitive manner. In many cases, community-level changes have overwhelmed the capacity of local child care providers and health service workers to respond to the language barriers and cultural parenting practices of the newly arriving immigrant groups, particularly if they have endured trauma. For example, many U.S. communities have worked to address the needs of the growing Hispanic population, but it has been documented that in some cases, eligible Latinos are “less likely to access available social services than other populations” ( Helms et al., 2015 ; Wildsmith et al., 2016 ).

strategies ( Crosnoe, 2006 ; Fuller and García Coll, 2010 ; Galindo and Fuller, 2010 ; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010 ; Takanishi, 2004 ). Immigrants often bring valuable social and human capital to the United States, including unique competencies and sociocultural strengths. Indeed, many young immigrant children display health and learning outcomes better than those of children of native-born parents in similar socioeconomic positions ( Crosnoe, 2013 ). At the same time, however, children with immigrant parents are more likely than children in native-born families to grow up poor ( Hernandez et al., 2008 , 2012 ; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015 ; Raphael and Smolensky, 2009 ). Immigrant parents’ efforts to raise healthy children also can be thwarted by barriers to integration that include language, documentation, and discrimination ( Hernandez et al., 2012 ; Yoshikawa, 2011 ).

The increase in the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity over the past several decades, related in part to immigration, is a trend that is expected to continue ( Colby and Ortman, 2015 ; Taylor, 2014 ). Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of Americans identifying as black, Hispanic, Asian, or “other” increased from 15 percent to 36 percent of the population ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ). Over this same time, the percentage of non-Hispanic white children under age 10 declined from 60 percent to 52 percent, while the percentage of Hispanic ethnicity (of any race) grew from about 19 percent to 25 percent ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ); the percentages of black/African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian children under age 10 remained relatively steady (at about 15%, 1%, and 4-5%, respectively); and the percentages of children in this age group identifying as two or more races increased from 3 percent to 5 percent ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ).

The above-noted shifts in the demographic landscape with regard to family structure, including increases in divorce rates and cohabitation, new types of parental relationships, and the involvement of grandparents and other relatives in the raising of children ( Cancian and Reed, 2008 ; Fremstad and Boteach, 2015 ), have implications for how best to support families. Between 1960 and 2014, the percentage of children under age 18 who lived with two married parents (biological, nonbiological, or adoptive) decreased from approximately 85 percent to 64 percent. In 1960, 8 percent of children lived in households headed by single mothers; by 2014, that figure had tripled to about 24 percent ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ; U.S. Census Bureau, 2016 ). Meanwhile, the proportions of children living with only their fathers or with neither parent (with either relatives or non-relatives) have remained relatively steady since the mid-1980s, at about 4 percent (see Figure 1-2 ). Black children are significantly more likely to live in households headed by single mothers and also are more likely to live in households where neither parent is present. In 2014, 34 percent of black

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children lived with two parents, compared with 58 percent of Hispanic children, 75 percent of white children, and 85 percent of Asian children ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ).

From 1996 to 2015, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose from 1.2 million to 3.3 million ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ). Moreover, data from the National Health Interview Survey show that in 2013, 30,000 children under age 18 had married same-sex parents and 170,000 had unmarried same-sex parents, and between 1.1 and 2.0 million were being raised by a parent who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual but was not part of a couple ( Gates, 2014 ).

More families than in years past rely on kinship care (full-time care of children by family members other than parents or other adults with whom children have a family-like relationship). When parents are unable to care for their children because of illness, military deployment, incarceration, child abuse, or other reasons, kinship care can help cultivate familial and community bonds, as well as provide children with a sense of stability and belonging ( Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012 ; Winokur et al., 2014 ). It is estimated that the number of children in kinship care grew six times the rate of the number of children in the general population over the past decade ( Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012 ). In 2014, 7 percent of children lived in households headed by grandparents, as compared with 3 percent in 1970 ( Child Trends Databank, 2015b ), and as of 2012, about 10 percent of American children lived in a household where a grandparent was present ( Ellis and Simmons, 2014 ). Black children are twice as likely as the overall population of children to live in kinship arrangements, with about 20 percent of black children spending time in kinship care at some point

during their childhood ( Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012 ). Beyond kinship care, about 400,000 U.S. children under age 18 are in foster care with about one-quarter of these children living with relatives ( Child Trends Databank, 2015c ). Of the total number of children in foster care, 7 percent are under age 1, 33 percent are ages 1-5, and 23 percent are ages 6-10 ( Child Trends Databank, 2015c ). Other information about the structure of American families is more difficult to come by. For example, there is a lack of data with which to assess trends in the number of children who are raised by extended family members through informal arrangements as opposed to through the foster care system.

As noted earlier, fathers, including biological fathers and other male caregivers, have historically been underrepresented in parenting research despite their essential role in the development of young children. Young children with involved and nurturing fathers develop better linguistic and cognitive skills and capacities, including academic readiness, and are more emotionally secure and have better social connections with peers as they get older ( Cabrera and Tamis-LeMonda, 2013 ; Harris and Marmer, 1996 ; Lamb, 2004 ; Pruett, 2000 ; Rosenberg and Wilcox, 2006 ; Yeung et al., 2000 ). Conversely, children with disengaged fathers have been found to be more likely to develop behavioral problems ( Amato and Rivera, 1999 ; Ramchandani et al., 2013 ). With both societal shifts in gender roles and increased attention to fathers’ involvement in childrearing in recent years, fathers have assumed greater roles in the daily activities associated with raising young children, such as preparing and eating meals with them, reading to and playing and talking with them, and helping them with homework ( Bianchi et al., 2007 ; Cabrera et al., 2011 ; Jones and Mosher, 2013 ; Livingston and Parker, 2011 ). In two-parent families, 16 percent of fathers were stay-at-home parents in 2012, compared with 10 percent in 1989; 21 percent of these fathers stayed home specifically to care for their home or family, up from 5 percent in 1989 ( Livingston, 2014 ). At the same time, however, fewer fathers now live with their biological children because of increases in nonmarital childbearing (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).

In addition, as alluded to earlier, parents of young children face trans-formative changes in technology that can have a strong impact on parenting and family life ( Collier, 2014 ). Research conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that, relative to other household configurations, married parents with children under age 18 use the Internet and cell phones, own computers, and adopt broadband at higher rates ( Duggan and Lenhart, 2015 ). Other types of households, however, such as single-parent and unmarried multiadult households, also show high usage of technology, particularly text messaging and social media ( Smith, 2015 ). Research by the Pew Research Center (2014) shows that many parents—25 percent in

one survey ( Duggan et al., 2015 )—view social media as a useful source of parenting information.

At the same time, however, parents also are saturated with information and faced with the difficulty of distinguishing valid information from fallacies and myths about raising children ( Aubrun and Grady, 2003 ; Center on Media and Human Development, 2014 ; Dworkin et al., 2013 ; Future of Children, 2008 ). Given the number and magnitude of innovations in media and communications technologies, parents may struggle with understanding the optimal use of technology in the lives of their children.

Despite engagement with Internet resources, parents still report turning to family, friends, and physicians more often than to online sources such as Websites, blogs, and social network sites for parenting advice ( Center on Media and Human Development, 2014 ). Although many reports allude to the potentially harmful effects of media and technology, parents generally do not report having many concerns or family conflicts regarding their children’s media use. On the other hand, studies have confirmed parents’ fears about an association between children’s exposure to violence in media and increased anxiety ( Funk, 2005 ), desensitization to violence ( Engelhardt et al., 2011 ), and aggression ( Willoughby et al., 2012 ). And although the relationship between media use and childhood obesity is challenging to disentangle, studies have found that children who spend more time with media are more likely to be overweight than children who do not (see Chapter 2 ) ( Bickham et al., 2013 ; Institute of Medicine, 2011 ; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004 ).

The benefits of the information age have included reduced barriers to knowledge for both socially advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Yet despite rapidly decreasing costs of many technologies (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and computers), parents of lower socioeconomic position and from racial and ethnic minority groups are less likely to have access to and take advantage of these resources ( Center on Media and Human Development, 2014 ; File and Ryan, 2014 ; Institute of Medicine, 2006 ; Perrin and Duggan, 2015 ; Smith, 2015 ; Viswanath et al., 2012 ). A digital divide also exists between single-parent and two-parent households, as the cost of a computer and monthly Internet service can be more of a financial burden for the former families, which on average have lower household incomes ( Allen and Rainie, 2002 ; Dworkin et al., 2013 ).

STUDY APPROACH

The committee’s approach to its charge consisted of a review of the evidence in the scientific literature and several other information-gathering activities.

Evidence Review

The committee conducted an extensive review of the scientific literature pertaining to the questions raised in its statement of task ( Box 1-2 ). It did not undertake a full review of all parenting-related studies because it was tasked with providing a targeted report that would direct stakeholders to best practices and succinctly capture the state of the science. The committee’s literature review entailed English-language searches of databases including, but not limited to, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Medline, the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science. Additional literature and other resources were identified by committee members and project staff using traditional academic research methods and online searches. The committee focused its review on research published in peer-reviewed journals and books (including individual studies, review articles, and meta-analyses), as well as reports issued by government agencies and other organizations. The committee’s review was concentrated primarily, although not entirely, on research conducted in the United States, occasionally drawing on research from other Western countries (e.g., Germany and Australia), and rarely on research from other countries.

In reviewing the literature and formulating its conclusions and recommendations, the committee considered several, sometimes competing, dimensions of empirical work: internal validity, external validity, practical significance, and issues of implementation, such as scale-up with fidelity ( Duncan et al., 2007 ; McCartney and Rosenthal, 2000 ; Rosenthal and Rosnow, 2007 ).

With regard to internal validity , the committee viewed random-assignment experiments as the primary model for establishing cause- and-effect relationships between variables with manipulable causes (e.g., Rosenthal and Rosnow, 2007 ; Shadish et al., 2001 ). Given the relatively limited body of evidence from experimental studies in the parenting literature, however, the committee also considered findings from quasi-experimental studies (including those using regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, and difference-in-difference techniques based on natural experiments) ( Duncan et al., 2007 ; Foster, 2010 ; McCartney et al., 2006 ) and from observational studies, a method that can be used to test logical propositions inherent to causal inference, rule out potential sources of bias, and assess the sensitivity of results to assumptions regarding study design and measurement. These include longitudinal studies and limited cross-sectional studies. Although quasi- and nonexperimental studies may fail to meet the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials for causal inference, studies with a variety of internal validity strengths and weaknesses can collectively provide useful evidence on causal influences ( Duncan et al., 2014 ).

When there are different sources of evidence, often with some differences in estimates of the strength of the evidence, the committee used its collective experience to integrate the information and draw reasoned conclusions.

With regard to external validity , the committee attempted to take into account the extent to which findings can be generalized across population groups and situations. This entailed considering the demographic, socioeconomic, and other characteristics of study participants; whether variables were assessed in the real-world contexts in which parents and children live (e.g., in the home, school, community); whether study findings build the knowledge base with regard to both efficacy (i.e., internal validity in highly controlled settings) and effectiveness (i.e., positive net treatment effects in ecologically valid settings); and issues of cultural competence ( Bracht and Glass, 1968 ; Bronfenbrenner, 2009 ; Cook and Campbell, 1979 ; Harrison and List, 2004 ; Lerner et al., 2000 ; Rosenthal and Rosnow, 2007 ; Whaley and Davis, 2007 ). However, the research literature is limited in the extent to which generalizations across population groups and situations are examined.

With regard to practical significance , the committee considered the magnitude of likely causal impacts within both an empirical context (i.e., measurement, design, and method) and an economic context (i.e., benefits relative to costs), and with attention to the salience of outcomes (e.g., how important an outcome is for promoting child well-being) ( Duncan et al., 2007 ; McCartney and Rosenthal, 2000 ). As discussed elsewhere in this report, however, the committee found limited economic evidence with which to draw conclusions about investing in interventions at scale or to weigh the costs and benefits of interventions. (See the discussion of other information-gathering activities below.) Also with respect to practical significance, the committee considered the manipulability of the variables under consideration in real-world contexts, given that the practical significance of study results depend on whether the variables examined are represented or experienced commonly or uncommonly among particular families ( Fabes et al., 2000 ).

Finally, the committee took into account issues of implementation , such as whether interventions can be brought to and sustained at scale ( Durlak and DuPre, 2008 ; Halle et al., 2013 ). Experts in the field of implementation science emphasize not only the evidence behind programs but also the fundamental roles of scale-up, dissemination planning, and program monitoring and evaluation. Scale-up in turn requires attending to the ability to implement adaptive program practices in response to heterogeneous, real-world contexts, while also ensuring fidelity for the potent levers of change or prevention ( Franks and Schroeder, 2013 ). Thus, the committee relied on both evidence on scale-up, dissemination, and sustainability from empirically based programs and practices that have been implemented and

evaluated, and more general principles of implementation science, including considerations of capacity and readiness for scale-up and sustainability at the macro (e.g., current national politics) and micro (e.g., community resources) levels.

The review of the evidence conducted for this study, especially pertaining to strategies that work at the universal, targeted, and intensive levels to strengthen parenting capacity (questions 2 and 3 from the committee’s statement of task [ Box 1-2 ]), also entailed searches of several databases that, applying principles similar to those described above, assess the strength of the evidence for parenting-related programs and practices: the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), supported by SAMHSA; the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC), which is funded by the state of California; and Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, which has multiple funding sources. Although each of these databases is unique with respect to its history, sponsors, and objectives (NREPP covers mental health and substance abuse interventions, CEBC is focused on evidence relevant to child welfare, and Blueprints describes programs designed to promote the health and well-being of children), all are recognized nationally and internationally and undergo a rigorous review process.

The basic principles of evaluation and classification and the processes for classification of evidence-based practices are common across NREPP, CEBC, and Blueprints. Each has two top categories—optimal and promising—for programs and practices (see Appendix B ; see also Burkhardt et al., 2015 ; Means et al., 2015 ; Mihalic and Elliot, 2015 ; Soydan et al., 2010 ). Given the relatively modest investment in research on programs for parents and young children, however, the array of programs that are highly rated remains modest. For this reason, the committee considered as programs with the most robust evidence not only those included in the top two categories of Blueprints and CEBC but also those with an average rating of 3 or higher in NREPP. The committee’s literature searches also captured well-supported programs that are excluded from these databases (e.g., because they are recent and/or have not been submitted for review) but have sound theoretical underpinnings and rely on well-recognized intervention and implementation mechanisms.

Other reputable information sources used in producing specific portions of this report were What Works for Health (within the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps Program, a joint effort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin); the What Works Clearinghouse of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Services; and HHS’s Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness (HomVEE) review.

In addition, the committee chose to consider findings from research using methodological approaches that are emerging as a source of innovation and improvement. These approaches are gaining momentum in parent-

ing research and are being developed and funded by the federal government and private philanthropy. Examples are breakthrough series collaborative approaches, such as the Home Visiting Collaborative Innovation and Improvement Network to Reduce Infant Mortality, and designs such as factorial experiments that have been used to address topics relevant to this study.

Other Information-Gathering Activities

The committee held two open public information-gathering sessions to hear from researchers, practitioners, parents, and other stakeholders on topics germane to this study and to supplement the expertise of the committee members (see Appendix A for the agendas of these open sessions). Material from these open sessions is referenced in this report where relevant.

As noted above, the committee’s task included making recommendations related to promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective strategies for supporting parents and the salient knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Cost is an important consideration for the implementation of parenting programs at scale. Therefore, the committee commissioned a paper reviewing the available economic evidence for investing in parenting programs at scale to inform its deliberations on this portion of its charge. Findings and excerpts from this paper are integrated throughout Chapters 3 through 6 . The committee also commissioned a second paper summarizing evidence-based strategies used by health care systems and providers to help parents acquire and sustain knowledge, attitudes, and practices that promote healthy child development. The committee drew heavily on this paper in developing sections of the report on universal/preventive and targeted interventions for parents in health care settings. Lastly, a commissioned paper on evidence-based strategies to support parents of children with mental illness formed the basis for a report section on this population. 4

In addition, the committee conducted two sets of group and individual semistructured interviews with parents participating in family support programs at community-based organizations in Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C. Parents provided feedback on the strengths they bring to parenting, challenges they face, how services for parents can be improved, and ways they prefer to receive parenting information, among other topics. Excerpts from these interviews are presented throughout this report as “Parent Voices” to provide real-world examples of parents’ experiences and to supplement the discussion of particular concepts and the committee’s findings.

4 The papers commissioned by the committee are in the public access file for the study and can be requested at https://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/ManageRequest.aspx?key=49669 [October 2016].

TERMINOLOGY AND STUDY PARAMETERS

As specified in the statement of task for this study ( Box 1-2 ), the term “parents” refers in this report to those individuals who are the primary caregivers of young children in the home. Therefore, the committee reviewed studies that involved not only biolofical and adoptive parents but also relative/kinship providers (e.g., grandparents), stepparents, foster parents, and other types of caregivers, although research is sparse on unique issues related to nontraditional caregivers. The terms “knowledge,” “attitudes,” and “practices” and the relationships among them were discussed earlier in this chapter, and further detail can be found in Chapter 2 ).

The committee recognized that to a certain degree, ideas about what is considered effective parenting vary across cultures and ecological conditions, including economies, social structures, religious beliefs, and moral values ( Cushman, 1995 ). To address this variation, and in accordance with its charge, the committee examined research on how core parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices differ by specific characteristics of children, parents, and contexts. However, because the research on parenting has traditionally underrepresented several populations (e.g., caregivers other than mothers), the evidence on which the committee could draw to make these comparisons was limited.

The committee interpreted “evidence-based/informed strategies” very broadly as ranging from teaching a specific parenting skill, to manualized parenting programs, to policies that may affect parenting. The term “interventions” is generally used in this report to refer to all types of strategies, while more specific terms (e.g., “program,” “well-child care”) are used to refer to particular types or sets of interventions. Also, recognizing that nearly every facet of society has a role to play in supporting parents and ensuring that children realize their full potential, the committee reviewed not only strategies designed expressly for parents (e.g., parenting skills training) but also, though to a lesser degree, programs and policies not designed specifically for parents that may nevertheless affect an individual’s capacity to parent (e.g., food assistance and housing programs, health care policies).

As noted earlier in this chapter, this report was informed by a life-course perspective on parenting, given evidence from neuroscience and a range of related research that the early years are a critical period in shaping how individuals fare throughout their lives. The committee also aimed to take a strengths/assets-based approach (e.g., to identify strategies that build upon the existing assets of parents), although the extent to which this approach could be applied was limited by the paucity of research examining parenting from this perspective.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

A number of principles guided this study. First, following the ideas of Dunst and Espe-Sherwindt (2016) , the distinction between two types of family-centered practices—relational and participatory—informed the committee’s thinking. Relational practices are those focused primarily on intervening with families using compassion, active and reflective listening, empathy, and other techniques. Participatory practices are those that actively engage families in decision making and aim to improve families’ capabilities. In addition, family-centered practices focused on the context of successful parenting are a key third form of support for parenting. A premise of the committee is that many interventions with the most troubled families and children will require all these types of services—often delivered concurrently over a lengthy period of time.

Second, many programs are designed to serve families at particular risk for problems related to cognitive and social-emotional development, health, and well-being. Early Head Start and Head Start, for example, are means tested and designed for low-income families most of whom are known to face not just one risk factor (low income) but also others that often cluster together (e.g., living in dangerous neighborhoods, exposure to trauma, social isolation, unfamiliarity with the dominant culture or language). Special populations addressed in this report typically are at very high risk because of this exposure to multiple risk factors. Research has shown that children in such families have the poorest outcomes, in some instances reaching a level of toxic stress that seriously impairs their developmental functioning ( Shonkoff and Garner, 2012 ). Of course, in addition to characterizing developmental risk, it is essential to understand the corresponding adaptive processes and protective factors, as it is the balance of risk and protective factors that determines outcomes. In many ways, supporting parents is one way to attempt to change that balance.

From an intervention point of view, several principles are central. First, intervention strategies need to be designed to have measurable effects over time and to be sustainable. Second, it is necessary to focus on the needs of individual families and to tailor interventions to achieve desired outcomes. The importance of personalized approaches is widely acknowledged in medicine, education, and other areas. An observation perhaps best illustrated in the section on parents of children with developmental disabilities in Chapter 5 , although the committee believes this approach applies to many of the programs described in this report. A corresponding core principle of intervention is viewing parents as equal partners, experts in what both they and their children need. It is important as well that multiple kinds of services for families be integrated and coordinated. As illustrated earlier

in Box 1-1 , families may be receiving interventions from multiple sources delivered in different places, making coordination all the more important.

A useful framework for thinking about interventions is described in the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (2009) report Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders among Young People . Prevention interventions encompass mental health promotion: universal prevention, defined as interventions that are valuable for all children; selected prevention, aimed at populations at high risk (such as children whose parents have mental illness); and indicated prevention, focused on children already manifesting symptoms. Treatment interventions include case identification, standard treatment for known disorders, accordance of long-term treatment with the goal of reduction in relapse or occurrence, and aftercare and rehabilitation ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2009 ).

The committee recognizes that engaging and retaining children and families in parenting interventions are critical challenges. A key to promoting such engagement may be cultural relevance. Families representing America’s diverse array of cultures, languages, and experiences are likely to derive the greatest benefit from interventions designed and implemented to allow for flexibility.

Finally, the question of widespread implementation and dissemination of parenting interventions is critically important. Given the cost of testing evidence-based parenting programs, the development of additional programs needs to be built on the work that has been done before. Collectively, interventions also are more likely to achieve a significant level of impact if they incorporate some of the elements of prior interventions. In any case, a focus on the principles of implementation and dissemination clearly is needed. As is discussed in this report, the committee calls for more study and experience with respect to taking programs to scale.

REPORT ORGANIZATION

This report is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 2 examines desired outcomes for children and reviews the existing research on parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices that support positive parent-child interactions and child outcomes. Based on the available research, this chapter identifies a set of core knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of some of the major federally funded programs and policies that support parents in the United States. Chapters 4 and 5 describe evidence-based and evidence-informed strategies for supporting parents and enabling the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices, including universal and widely used interventions ( Chapter 4 ) and interventions targeted to parents of children with special needs and parents who themselves face adversities

( Chapter 5 ). Chapter 6 reviews elements of effective programs for strengthening parenting capacity and parents’ participation and retention in effective programs and systems. Chapter 7 describes a national framework for supporting parents of young children. Finally, Chapter 8 presents the committee’s conclusions and recommendations for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective intervention strategies and parenting practices linked to healthy child outcomes, as well as areas for future research.

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Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the family—which includes all primary caregivers—are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger.

Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting.

Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

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Importance of Parents in Life

Table of Contents

Introduction

“There are no bad children, just bad parents”. The importance of Parents in one’s life is quite evident from this eminent quotation. Parenthood is a responsible venture and there’s no debate on that topic.

In this fast-paced era, it is quite difficult for parents to mark their presence in their children’s life.

Millennial children who are exposed to versatilities of distractions find it difficult to find a connection with the ordinary. Not to mention children are quite blinded by the reign of the virtual world. 

Importance of Parents in Life - PDF

Child development lies its root in their parents. Nothing can overcome the rigidity of a child’s upbringing. A parent thereby acts as a visionary to their children. Some important points that talk about the importance of parents in child growth towards education are mentioned in the below Downloadable PDF.

Parents and children walking hand in hand

Parents play a pivotal role in their children’s life. They are the pillars of support, guidance, and love. Family is where life begins and love never ends. No matter how old a child gets there’s nothing more comforting and soothing than their parent's arms.

The role of parents in a child’s life is beyond the idea of prompting.

Parenting takes action long before a child’s birth and eventually parents become their children’s alter ego and vice-versa. There is nobody like them who can shape and mould a child’s behavior and development. 

So parents should never seize to inspire and assist their children and thereby parents should strive to be the best teacher in their child’s life.

Maintaining a good Parent-Child relationship is the first step towards wise parenting. Right from the birth of their offspring, parents should be aware of the enormous reliability and accountability in their child’s life.

Happy family with father, mother and two kids

Studies show that a foetus’ character development is succumbed by the alterations in its mother’s thoughts during pregnancy. Not giving the proper guidance and love can seriously affect a child’s life and can have serious impacts that will lead to character defects.

The parent is the child’s first teacher and will remain a consistent mentor in a child’s life.

What is the role of Parents in a Child's life?

To develop skills.

Parenting is a never-ending skill. Once you sign for it there’s no looking back. You will have to take charge and make the most of your time. Parenting and child development are in a symbiotic relationship.

When one flourishes, the other automatically finds balance. And this is the basic rule of every parent-child relationship.

Parents taking their kid for cycling

Parents contribute to the cognitive, socio-cultural, physical, mental, and spiritual development of an individual. Parental values and expertise play a vital role in the healthy upbringing of a child in all these areas. 

The foundation of all beliefs 

The profile of cognitive abilities, beliefs, ethical values, coping defenses, and salient emotional moods that characterize each child at each developmental stage is the result of diverse influences operating in complex ways.

Most students of human development agree that the most important determinants of the different profiles include the inherited physiologic patterns that are called temperamental qualities, parental practices and personality, quality of schools attended, relationships with peers, the ordinal position in the family, and, finally, the historical era in which late childhood and early adolescence are spent.

Prayer session by parents

As children develop from infants to teens to adults, they go through a series of developmental stages that are important to all aspects of their personhood including physical, intellectual, emotional, and social.  

Support and guidance

The proper role of the parent is to provide encouragement, support, and access to activities that enable the child to master key developmental tasks. A child’s learning and socialization are most influenced by their family since the family is the child’s primary social group. Happy parents raise happy children.

Child development lies its root in their parents. Nothing can overcome the rigidity of a child’s upbringing. A parent thereby acts as a visionary to their children.

mother helping her child out in homeworks

There’s nothing worldly that comes close to the sacrifices of parenthood. What parents do for their children out of love will always have an indelible remark on the child’s life.

A child who has never ceased to receive a balanced upbringing will continue to advance for the rest of their lives.

Parents also play a major role in the self-confidence of their children. If you want to increase the self-confidence of your child, read 6 Simple Tips to Build Self-Esteem and Confidence your Child.

Providing a good lifestyle

Education is one of the landmarks in a child’s development. A good education will hand over a rewarding career to the person and thereby they can serve society and return its bounties.

mother playing with her kids

It is imperative to know how parents influence the lives of their offspring and plays an important role in the child’s physical, mental, financial, emotional, and career development.

How can Parents become successful in their roles?

The importance of parents is something that children should comprehend involuntarily. It is not something that can be put forward as a moral or ethical question.

Studies show that apart from earlier times, contemporary parents have a higher chance of failure to maintain a good relationship with their children despite the nuclear family setups that we have these days.

Here is how you can build a successful rapport with your child. 

Parent child interaction

Communication is the key

Be it any relationship, communication is the foundation. Talk to your child about topics other than school and studies. This helps in contributing to better bondage between both parties. 

Engage in activities with them 

You inevitably spent quality time with your loved ones. In this case, do something with your kid that is exciting for them. This will eventually help them polish their interests. 

Apologize when you mess up

Transparent and candidness can do wonders in your relationship. Throw away your ego and apologize for your mistakes. So that the child can stand up for themselves during future endeavors. 

How can parents' actions influence their children?

A recent study shows that parents who actively interact with children help them develop crucial cognitive skills, life skills, and eventually thrive to be successful. Parents contribute to developing focus, concentration, and self-control in their children.

They also improve critical thinking, empathy, perspective, making connections, and communicating. With a supportive parent, a child never regrets taking risks and this prepares a self-directed child. Parents' interactions have a huge impact on the child’s development, be it physical or mental.

Apart from genetic inheritance, children have a tendency to mimic their parents in almost any field. This increases the liability of a parent to be a role model for their children. The efforts from a parent’s side have great effects on their children. 

Parents with their kid on a beach

Even though each child is different and special in their capabilities, parents are the ones who can shape and assist their children without fail. It is the responsibility of parents to ensure a safe and sound environment for their children.

“The attitude that you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from, more than what you tell them. They remember what you are''; these words by Jim Henson alarm us about the role of Parents in a child’s life and justifies the impact and influence of parents in a child’s life. 

Parenting is sometimes about finding happiness in sacrifices. And these sacrifices will not seize to rapture you in the long run. A child with a remarkable upbringing will never fail to make their parents proud. Parents are responsible to provide the necessary food, clothing, shelter, and medical care insofar as they are able.

Animated image of father-daughter

They are equally responsible for providing sound education and sound knowledge of their religion as well as the moral training of their children. In the same way, children are responsible to appreciate their parent’s promising efforts to ensure a good life for them.

Having said all these, parenthood is not just about sacrifice, it is also teaching your child to master their life on their own.

They should hand over responsibilities for their children so that they learn problem-solving skills at a young age. This will reduce the chances of being left out when they hit adulthood. 

Parents play a pivotal role in their children’s lives and each of their actions will solely depend upon the parenting techniques adopted by their parents. Our future is our children and in order to ensure a better tomorrow, we have to train and shape our children with care and love.

Father-son duo playing with blocks

So it’s imperative that every parent decode their child’s peculiarities and assist them in their overall development and thereby contributing to a better tomorrow. When a child is happy, then parents are happy. Parents do almost all the things to make their child educated and well respected in society.

Whatever the situation or whatever is the problem that a child faces in life, parents should try and motivate and inspire them by their own examples to make a tough into good. Parents try to make the balance in their child’s emotional persistence that helps to improve tough situations faster. 

Importance of Parents' in developing Math

Parents play a major role in improving mathematical skills in their children. The most important thing is daily mathematical reasoning.

Early education experts stress reading to children every day, and math should be part of a daily regimen as well.

mother teaching child how to count

Since most parents use math in some form every day, they should be able to help their children develop mathematical reasoning without going too far out of their way to design lessons or learn more math themselves.

Parents can help their children apply maths in daily activities like shopping and this brings a lot of difference in their logical skills.

  • The parent-child relationship is important because it lays the foundation for the child’s personality, life choices, and overall behavior. It can also affect the strength of their social, physical, mental, and emotional health. 
  • Children who have a healthy relationship with their parents are more likely to develop positive relationships with other people around them. They can establish secure bonds and friendships with peers. 
  • The healthy involvement of parents in their children’s day to day life helps ensure that their kids can perform better socially and academically.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS

May 21, 2022

“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my mother.”  – Abraham Lincoln

Parents play an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children. This relationship has a profound impact on a child’s mental, physical, social and emotional development as well as their overall well-being and happiness. Parents help us in every step of our life. “Even when young children spend most of their waking hours in child-care, parents remain the most influential adults in their lives,” writes Jack Shonkoff, a board-certified pediatrician who sits on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The hallmark of the parental relationship is the readily observable fact that this special adult is not interchangeable with others,“ he notes. “A child may not care about who cuts his hair or takes money at the store, but he cares a great deal about who is holding him when he is unsure, comforts him when he is hurt, and shares special moments in his life.”  The relationship between parents and their children impacts children not just in childhood but throughout their entire lifetime. It affects all areas of a child’s life, including health and development, educational progress and professional opportunities as well as life choices.

One of the main roles of parents is providing encouragement, support and access to activities that enable a child to master key developmental tasks.  A child’s learning and socialization are most influenced by their family since the family is the child’s primary social group. Providing and supporting a child with education is one of the landmarks in a child’s development.  A good education will help provide a rewarding career to the person and thereby they will positively contribute to society.  Parents are also their children’s biggest cheerleaders and give them unconditional love.  

Some of the facts about the importance of parent involvement are:

  • Children who have parental support are likely to have better health as adults
  • Students with involved parents tend to earn higher grades, have better social skills, and are more likely to graduate and go on to post-secondary education
  • Children are more likely to be socially competent and have better communication skills when they have parents who are sensitive to their needs and emotions
  • Teens who are monitored by their parents are less likely than teens with “hands-off” parents to smoke, drink and use drugs.

Maintaining a good parent-child relationship is crucial to wise parenting.  Starting right from the birth of a child, parents should always be aware of the enormous impact they have on their children’s lives.  Their impact sets the stage for raising a confident, educated and secure young adult who is ready to face the challenges of life.

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Parent as Most Important Humans in Your Life: Respecting Our Parents

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essay on the importance of parents

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Handbook of Parenting and Child Development Across the Lifespan pp 3–26 Cite as

The Importance of Parenting in Influencing the Lives of Children

  • Matthew R. Sanders 3 &
  • Karen M. T. Turner 3  
  • First Online: 07 December 2018

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The quality of parenting children receive during childhood and adolescence plays a major role in influencing their developmental competence and ultimately their life course trajectories. The parent–child relationship has a pervasive impact on children, and affects many different areas of development including language and communication, executive function and self-regulation, sibling and peer relationships, academic attainment, and mental and physical health. This chapter provides an overview of evidence showing how parenting influences children’s development. In addition, we explore how the broader ecological contexts of parents’ lives influence parenting practices and family relationships. Proximal determinants of parenting (e.g., the parent–child relationship) and more distal factors (e.g., cultural and community context) combine to influence the quality of parenting children receive. We argue that evidence-based parenting support that is delivered at a whole of community level and is attuned to the broader ecological context of modern parenting is needed to promote competent parenting and to reduce the adverse effects of poor parenting on children. Policy-based investments in evidence-based parenting programs have great potential to enhance life course outcomes for both children and parents that can have major economic benefits to the entire community.

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The Parenting and Family Support Centre is partly funded by royalties stemming from published resources of the Triple P—Positive Parenting Program, which is developed and owned by the University of Queensland (UQ). Royalties are also distributed to the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences at UQ and contributory authors of published Triple P resources. Triple P International (TPI) Pty Ltd. is a private company licensed by UniQuest Pty Ltd. on behalf of UQ, to publish and disseminate Triple P worldwide. The authors of this chapter have no share or ownership of TPI. TPI has no involvement in the writing of this chapter. Matthew R Sanders is the founder of Triple P and receives royalties from TPI. He is a consultant to Triple P International and an employee at UQ. Karen Turner receives royalties from TPI and is an employee at UQ.

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Sanders, M.R., Turner, K.M.T. (2018). The Importance of Parenting in Influencing the Lives of Children. In: Sanders, M., Morawska, A. (eds) Handbook of Parenting and Child Development Across the Lifespan . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94598-9_1

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A Parent's Role

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

From encouraging schoolwork and sports to modeling values as a child grows (remember, they do as you do, not as you say!) parents exert enormous influence over their children's lives. They are, however, not the only on-the-ground influencers—especially after children enter school and begin interacting with the world at large.

Most parents work to give children the best start possible, but it's also important for parents to recognize that kids come into the world with their own temperaments, personalities, and goals . While parents may want to push their child down a certain path, a parents' job is to provide an interface with the world that ultimately prepares a child for complete independence and the ability to pursue whatever path they choose.

In a rapidly changing world, parenting can be subject to fads and changing styles, and parenting in some privileged circles has become a competitive sport. But the needs of child development as delineated by science remain relatively stable: safety, structure, support, and love.

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To parent effectively, it’s not enough to simply avoid the obvious dangers like abuse, neglect, or overindulgence. Indeed, The National Academy of Sciences delineates four major responsibilities for parents: maintaining children's health and safety, promoting their emotional well-being, instilling social skills, and preparing children intellectually.

Numerous studies suggest that the best-adjusted children are reared by parents who find a way to combine warmth and sensitivity with clear behavioral expectations. Parents may find the Four C’s to be a helpful acronym: care (showing acceptance and affection), consistency (maintaining a stable environment), choices (allowing the child to develop autonomy), and consequences (applying repercussions of choices, whether positive or negative).

To learn more, see How to Be a Good Parent and Supporting Children's Education .

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Not every parenting style is in the child's best interest. There is such a thing as overparenting, which can cripple children as they move into adulthood and render them unable to cope with the merest setbacks.

Two well-known examples of overparenting styles include "helicopter parenting," in which children are excessively monitored and kept out of harm's way, and "snowplow parenting," in which potential obstacles are removed from a child's path. Both can negatively impact a child's later independence, mental health, and self-esteem .

Of course, there is such a thing as too-little parenting, too, and research establishes that lack of parental engagement often leads to poor behavioral outcomes in children. This may be, in part, because it encourages the young to be too reliant on peer culture. Ironically, overly harsh or authoritarian styles of parenting can have the same effect.

Ultimately, parents should strive to be loving but firm, while allowing children enough space to develop their own interests, explore independence, and experience failure.

To learn more, see Dysfunctional Parenting and Parental Burnout and Stress.

essay on the importance of parents

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Today, more teens are at peace and happier when they are detached from their devices. Here are 5 ways to help parents create a smartphone contract to manage screen time.

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Importance of Parents in our Life

by Ipsita Sinha | Aug 28, 2019 | Parenting | 0 comments

Importance of Parents in our Life

When a child is born, parents are the ones who assure unconditional love to them. The importance of responsible parenthood in our lives is something we have gathered ever since we were born into this world. A child learns the ways of the world through the eyes of his/her parents and gains knowledge to mediate through difficulties with the help of their guidance. The upbringing of children is entirely dependent on the parent’s love and care. Whether it is mental or physical growth, emotional or social development, career or financial establishment, our parents help us in every possible way. This shows the value of parents in our life . Whether it is a small decision on which storybook to read from next to making the right career choice, their help is unconditional. Ask about the value of parents to those who have lost theirs at a very early age. They know the hardships and struggles to lead a life without parents.

The importance of parents can be seen in different aspects of life. Parents have a high influence on children in many ways including how they walk, talk or act in front of others. In India, the younger generation still follows the advice given by their elders. So, they are like the roots which will make us strong enough to sustain any storm that can come in our life. The truth is that our parents are essential parts to help us overcome our insufficiencies and improve our attributes. Although it is a hard job, the importance of good parenting matters. The role of parents in education differs from the role of others, where the parents work multi-functionally depending on the role.

Types of Parenting:

There are different types of parenting like gentle parenting, authoritative parenting, and more; It depends on them to be the one for their kids. There are really lot of pros when it comes to Effective Parenting Practices. Like:

  • Will create a healthy relationship between the parents and kids
  • Helps in improving the mental health of the kid.
  • Will build their skills in discipline, responsibilities, and more. 
  • Self-confidence would be upscaled.
  • Emotional development would be healthy.

Their contributions to a child’s development:

The importance of parents in a child’s development is the key to a better life and the strength in his/her character. The role of parents in students life / our life is a very significant one. They help us shape into better individuals and drive a child to develop as the best individual.

1. Unconditional love by them

We all know that god can’t be present everywhere so he made parents. These divine souls our parents are the ones who shower real love on us. They share our sorrows to reduce the pain. They multiply our happiness with their presence.

Love and care are equally vital elements and food for the soul like food and shelter is for every human being’s physical self. The ones who remain away from parents’ love may become a loner and face many tough times in their lives.

2. Parents’ guidance during the adolescence phase

Every child will go through the adolescence phase when they are teenagers and they feel a huge generation gap with their respective parents during this time. It is a tricky phase for parents as well. Parents often think that their children are still young and childish. They are prone to making mistakes by involving themselves in the wrong situations. This is where their parental instincts kick in, wanting to protect their children from harm’s way. Whereas the children who are now little grown-ups think they can manage themselves as they now want to exercise their freedom of choice and weigh out the pros and cons of the decisions they make by themselves. And they fail to understand the mentality of parents who don’t allow them to go on outings with friends, night outs or picnics to faraway places etc.

Communication is the key secret to this solution. Both parents and children should share all their inner feelings and desires so that things get easier.

Importance of parents in our life

3. Moral support by Parents

Having parents by our sides gives us moral support for every hurdle that we face. If a small kid falls and gets hurt, the mother provides immediate mental support and consoles the child. Even though our failures, you will never see them let you down, rather, they provide you with all the support and guidance you need to get back up on your feet. If a man ever faces difficulty at any point in time, his parents give the initial moral support and strength to tackle the situation.

Failure can come to us anytime and it is quite obvious for all of us. The knowledge given by our parents helps us to survive and manage that scenario.

4. Financial support by Parents

Many privileged people get financial support from their parents which helps to establish themselves in their careers or future endeavours. Sufficient financial assistance from parents allows them to perceive their hobbies or education without worrying about money. Having experienced the world, they also give their children financial advice so they can manage their expenses while saving their money for the future. 

Young people can achieve good posts in their parent’s company or with support they can even start up a new business.

5. Role of Parents in our Education

Parents’ endless effort to earn a living so that they can provide a proper education to their children is worth mentioning. When the child gets good marks in examinations, happiness can be seen on the faces of the parents.

Parents are the child’s first teachers in the early years. So learning starts from home and then follows to school. Parents make us understand the value of education through an exciting and meaningful learning process. Here they also establish the morals and values that we must nurture as an individual in society and garner the respect of those we meet which is a core element in every individual’s life. 

They pay attention to the minute requirements of a child by exploring nature, playing or doing activities , reading or cooking and spending many more precious moments together. T his is not just to teach them these activities but for them to enhance and sharpen their life skills that are a vital part of our lives.

importance of Parents in our life

6. Family support given by our Parents

Life surprises us at times and we face some failures. Parents are the biggest support when failures like divorce or accidents occur. They provide instant support and strength to deal with our failures and resume our normal life. Their efforts to make your lives easy signifies the important role of parents in your life . Similarly, we have seen a lot of times serious effects on the children of divorced parents as they become depressed in life.

Family support can be a great advantage. We even learn prayers, spirituality and other aspects to build our strength back after failure. Also, joint families are a real help when we are becoming parents. Our mother, grandmother or mother-in-law is very experienced in any queries related to childbirth and pregnancies . Their support during our pregnancy days or the initial days after childbirth is like a boon for us.

In India, where the family follows traditional family rules, parents also help us to make us understand the requirement and awareness of marriage. They even solve many minor or major compatibility issues between couples.

7. The basis for all beliefs

Each child’s profile of cognitive abilities, beliefs, ethical ideals, coping mechanisms, and prominent emotional states at each developmental stage is the consequence of several factors acting in complicated ways.

The most critical determinants of the different profiles, according to most students of human development, are inherited physiologic patterns known as temperamental attributes, parental practises and personality, school quality attended, friendships with peers, ordinal family place, and, finally, the historical era in which late childhood and adolescent years are spent.

Role of Parents in child’s confidence build up and in child’s success

Parents always want their children to succeed in life. So, they keep forcing us to follow the right path. We can see all over the world many successful human beings who are giving credit to their parents. Numerous success stories depict the guidance and advice given by parents. We can even write in detail an essay on parents role in our life .

The sole objective of parental encouragement is to build and boost their child’s confidence so that they grow up to be an independent respectable person. The child should become self-responsible and can easily climb the ladder of achievement. The importance of parents in our lives is so vast that in every step, and every milestone they are there to cheer us for any accomplishments and achievements we make, encouraging us to move further and become the best. This helps us become confident in ourselves and our potential in the talents we manifest in our lives. With this, you can figure out the role of parents in child life .

Childhood is the most precious period of life where we gain all kinds of experiences. We keep the lessons learned during this phase of life in our minds forever. Security and safety are the fundamental requirements for parents when a child is born. Children who grow up in a state of fear due to aggressive or impulsive parents find it hard to lead life properly.

Parents let their love flow through their verbal expressions, a touch of appreciation and various encouraging actions. Efficient and successful parents can convey their love to their children.

Our responsibilities towards our Parents

There are uncountable thoughts that can crowd our minds to show the importance of parents in our lives. More appropriately, parents are actually living for their children.

In this present world, how many of us are truly caring for our aged parents? Ask this question to yourself!

Importance of parents in our life

This is the time we should start realizing their worth and take a lot of care with an ample amount of love and kindness. We now know the value of parents and the compromises as well as sacrifices they make just so we can achieve our dreams and live the life we want. Our responsibility is to see them always smiling in their old age taking care of them just the way they took care of us, never once complaining. Take their blessings before they leave us as much as they can.

How to take care of your ageing parents

  • Acknowledge their problems
  • Please include them in every process
  • Spend time with them
  • Motivate them to work out or work out with them
  • Encourage them to go out with people of their age
  • Make sure their nutrition and sleep are up to the mark

Simple ways to make parents happy/Our duties for ageing parents

Be obedient:.

Obeying your parents isn’t something that you do only when you’re younger. Obey them in every stage of your life, however old you may be, always listen to them and carry out whatever they may ask of you.

Be Respectful:

Respecting your parents shows good character and your love for them. While you may have grown into your own person and might clash with your ageing parents, always try to respect them no matter what.

Be Grateful:

Being thankful and grateful for everything your parents have done for you is of utmost importance. Parenting a child can be hard, but parents do an amazing job of it, so show and tell them.

Be Helpful:

Always help your parents in life in different ways. It can be something small like with home chores, or it can be in a big way with getting them a new place or helping with any debts they may have.

Make them Proud:

Parents are happiest when they see their children achieve things in life. While these achievements may vary from family to family, always remember what they’ve taught you and abide by them to keep the family’s name.

Follow These Kind Gestures To Make Your Parents Feel Special

If you are planning to make your parents feel special, you can follow these kind gestures.

Share Memories

There are a tonne of wonderful experiences and priceless memories between all of the family members. You can share and recollect them with your parents to have a good time.

Celebrate Occasions

You can celebrate and cherish festive occasions with your parents to feel them so bonded. By celebrating and arranging for special occasions, you can get to know the role of parents in your life .  

Prepare Meals For Them

Consider the meals that your parents always look forward to and that make them happy. To make them feel special, you can prepare their favorite homemade meals for them. While preparing food, you can think about the importance of parenting .

Plan a Vacation With Them

If you want to create unforgettable memories together with your parents then what can be more worthwhile than planning a vacation with them? You can relax your parents from the daily domestic chores through a beautiful vacation. 

The parent-child connection is crucial because it shapes a child’s personality, life choices, and general conduct. It may also impact their physical, social, mental, and emotional well-being. Children are observant learners and inculcate everything they see which is why children who have a good relationship with their parents are more likely to form better and healthy relationships with others. Likewise, with their classmates, they can form solid ties and friendships.

Parents who are actively involved in their children’s daily lives are more likely to see improvements in their children’s social and academic performance.

others. Likewise, with their classmates, they can form solid ties and friendships.

Parents who are actively involved in their children’s daily lives are more likely to see improvements in their children’s social and academic performance.

1. What is the importance of parents in our life?

Parents are the primary caregivers for a child when he/she is born. The importance of the bond between parents and children can not be articulated in words. In addition to being pure and selfless, this relationship lays the foundation for the overall personality of a child and influences his/her perspective while forming various other relationships in life. ( 1 )  Parents reinforce feelings of dependability, love and care in a child that go a long way in helping a person trust people and become trustworthy as well.

2. Why are parents the best?

If you want me to explain the importance of parents in the family cannot be discounted. They are a child’s protectors, nurturers, guides and mentors. When the kids are young, they indulge the child in various minor games and act like a child to bring a smile to their kid’s faces. Subsequently, parents assume the role of a friend, teacher and companion as their child grows up and transverses through various stages of life.

3. Why are parents the best role models?

There is no undermining the fact that parents are the first heroes of their children. Parents personify the very essence of life as perceived by their little child. As a matter of fact, a newborn can identify his/her mother’s body fragrance and consequently responds by mouthing or some other action.  

Since parents have the closest and the most intimate encounters with their children in their formative years, it is safe to say that they are the best role models for their children. 

4. How can parents support their child’s goals?

Parents can encourage their children to creativity and active learning. They can help to set their kid’s goals and visualise how to address the problems ahead.    

5. How to maintain a positive emotional connection with my parents?

You can smile positively at your parents to let them know how you care about their well-being. Your body language can improve your relationship and can set the tone for your communication with your parents.  

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essay on the importance of parents

About Ipsita Sinha

A friendly mother, an engineering graduate, a teacher and a romantic genuine person in heart recently discovered a writer in me. Being a mommy blogger, thoughts keep flooding in my mind. I love to explore my life with new things including parenting and motherhood. I truly believe in the saying "keep your eyes on the stars and feet on the ground".

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Importance of Parenting Concepts Classification Essay

Introduction.

Parenting is a continuous process that usually does not produce immediate results. This implies that parents have to be actively involved in child rearing to ensure positive development and nurture desired norms and values.

Parenting is termed as a gift and a privilege since parents are given the opportunity to positively impact a person’s life. This paper highlights the definitions of parenting, explains different parenting styles, drawbacks to successful parenting and reviews emerging issues in the area. It also seeks to examine the ecological model and its relation to parenting.

Definitions of Parenting

Parenting, often referred to as child rearing, refers to the process of providing emotional, physical, social and financial support towards the full growth of a child. It can be carried out by biological parents or adoptive parents who take it upon themselves to ensure that a child develops progressively from infancy to adulthood.

Upon reaching adulthood, children are in better positions to assume independence. Competent parenting is achieved through a gradual process of acquiring skills and adapting to different environments (which a child and a parent are often exposed to).

Competent parenting

Competent parenting is achieved through a combination of several features. To ensure positive growth in a child, parents need to be sensitive to a variety of factors.

Parenting depends on pre-existing conditions of a child which include traits, abilities, characteristics and type of temperament. Competent parenting entails several features which parents should strive to cultivate: perceptiveness, flexibility, responsiveness and persistence (Parenting Today, 2013).

Perceptiveness calls for the need to be aware and observant of a childs’ emotional and behavioral changes. This facilitates identification and regulation of child behavior. Observance requires parents to be attentive to small details that often go unnoticed.

Some events that occur during child growth require parents to be sensitive to different changes which influence them. Upon identifying these changes, parents can thereby act accordingly. This eliminates the problem of ‘passive parenting’, which is evident in some families.

Flexibility refers to the ability to adapt to different situations appropriately. This implies that parents should be armed with a wide range of problem solving skills, usually acquired from experience and previous learning. This facilitates the possibility of effectively responding to different demands and situations, as and when need arises.

Different situations present themselves (ranging from academics, social and personal issues) during child development. It is the responsibility of the parent to ensure that they are armed with adequate problem solving skills to deal with these situations adequately.

Responsiveness is aimed at fostering adjustment based on changing needs of a child. Parents should be aware of what their children are going through and in the process understand that a parents’ warmth is vital for child development.

Affection should be expressed in all situations including rebuke. Gradual persistence builds on optimism which arises from positive attitudes. Children often learn from parents’ behavior through observation and this affects impartation of skills.

Challenges to successful parenting

Certain factors impinge on successful parenting. Cultivating positive parenting is arguably vital for growth in children. However, various aspects act as drawbacks to successful parenting. One major drawback arises from lack of cohesion between two parents. This usually occurs when one of the parents upholds certain values, often relating to discipline, that the other considers irrelevant.

In this case, the child is aware of the conflict transpiring between parents and may be torn between whom to follow and who not to. Children should be oblivious of any conflict between parents.

Parents should display consistency in matters relating to discipline and decisions that have a great effect on a child. Failure to do this may lead to emergence of rifts and favoritism arising from a child preferring one parent over the other because of the values they uphold.

Parenting is also affected by dysfunctionalaities in individual parents. These dysfunctionalaities arise from poor backgrounds of the child’s’ parents which leave them clueless on how to practice good parenting. Involvement of parents in drugs, alcohol or crime affects child upbringing negatively.

Issues pertaining to depression and lack of good family standings contribute to setbacks in child development. The common scenario is where parents concentrate on other things (like drugs, gambling and excessive drinking) at the expense of their children. They forget their parental responsibilities meaning that they are not in a position to execute responsibilities. This amounts to negligence

Negative media also influences parenting. The media is filled with all sorts of negative messages that children are exposed to. As a result, children believe what they see and acquire a perception of ‘I want a mommy or daddy’ like that. This is evident from many reality shows where parental values and acceptable norms are often ignored.

Despite the drawbacks mentioned above, there are several key ingredients to successful parenting. They include enforcement of rewards and punishment to support good behavior and manners. Children should be reminded of consequences that emerge as a result of the decisions they make.

Another key ingredient is ensuring consistency disciplinary values to serve as a reminder to children. These setbacks can be alleviated by exercising a variety of things which include counseling and attending parenting programs to assist in acquisition of desired skills and abilities (Guhl & Fontenelle, 2000).

Parenting styles

There are a variety of parenting styles that have been defined by scholars and psychologists alike. These styles are based on how parents respond to situations and their level of control. Failure to strike a balance between responsiveness and control can be detrimental to a child’s’ growth and lead to a disaster in parenting (Schaffer, 2009).

Children who grow up in settings where one of the requirements is overemphasized tend to have issues relating to esteem, discipline and more often than not, academic performance may be negatively affected. This may trigger depression and anxiety at later stages in life.

The four major types of parenting styles include authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and uninvolved parenting. These styles represent constructs and strategies that parents apply in parenting (Balter, 2000).

Authoritative parenting

It is categorized as one of the most balanced and democratic types of parenting which is geared towards wholeness and positive maturity of child. This is due to the fact that parents are both responsive and demanding. It is based on a collective approach to parenting which involves children in the problem solving process.

This form of parenting gives a child a sense of freedom in making decisions hence cultivating independence. However, parents initially determine standards and continuously monitor their children to ensure they act responsibly. Disciplinary measures are characterized by a level of objectiveness rather than violent bursts which would otherwise engrave a negative image on the importance of discipline in a child (Brooks, 2000).

Authoritarian parenting

Authoritarian parenting is also referred to ‘strict parenting’. Authoritarian parenting is characterized by parents who are not responsive, however they are demanding. Parents usually set principles and standards that are to be religiously adhered to, with little or no discussions with the child. No form of explanation is provided to the child regarding the rules and regulations that have been defined by parents.

The result of such strictness leads to growth of ‘social dwarfs’. In this case, children are socially incompetent of developing relations due to the fact that they are accustomed to being told what to do and are seldom allowed to follow their hearts. Most children who have underwent this form of parenting end up feeling very insecure and are incapable of developing lasting social relations (Schaffer & Kipp, 2009).

Permissive parenting

Permissive parenting is considered a form of lenient parenting. It is responsive yet not demanding. Parents exercise little control over their children. Responsiveness emerges from the fact that parents are sensitive to the children’s’ needs despite failure to set strict rules and standards relating to behavior and manners.

The major disadvantage of this type of parenting is the fact that children from such homes end up engaging in misconduct as they are used to having their way in doing things (Bjorklund & Blasi, 2011).

Uninvolved parenting

Uninvolved parenting is mainly passive. Parents are unaware and insensitive to child growth and development. It is characterized by lack of responsiveness and demand in raising up a child. This form of parenting is neglectful due to the fact that it does not take into consideration any of the important strategies. Parents are completely detached and unsupportive to emerging needs of a child.

Such parents normally have other priorities (and values) other than child growth. They are totally unaware of events that children go through. As a result of this, children develop a sense of false independence because they are left to mature on their own.

Children who are a product of such parenting have social relation issues and find it difficult to observe any set rules and regulations. Neglect usually arises from a variety of things which include addiction to harmful and illegal substances, financial issues and failure to prioritize the importance of child upbringing (Sigelman & Rider, 2011).

Parenting should not be regarded as an ‘in house’ task. The community plays a major role in ensuring that parents are kept on their toes in exercising positive parenting. The community should cultivate a culture where acceptable norms, values and mannerisms of behavior are encouraged and emphasized.

The community has a role in ensuring that parental programs, to instill parental values and encourage competency in parenting, are conducted to promote child growth and development (Fisher & Lerner, 2004).

The ecological model and parenting

The ecological model supports the idea that children’s growth and development is equally determined by external factors. Healthy maturity depends on settings that are beyond the confines of a home. The ecological model places a child at the center of micro systems which the child is in constant interaction with. External events, values and norms are learned by children depending on the environments they are in.

Child development is evidently affected by settings like educational institutions, extended families and community neighborhoods. As a child grows and time passes by, contexts change and each of the new developments affect the growth of the child hence parenting should accommodate these changes (Luster & Okagaki, 2005).

Skills of a competent parent

Parenting has been termed as a demanding task despite being a natural process. A parent needs to invest time in ensuring proper upbringing of a child. Becoming a better parent calls for acquisition of certain skills to foster good health, success and development of a child. The most important is love.

Parents should be affectionate to their children and create time to bond with them. This in turn creates a feeling of appreciation.(10 Skills of Competent Parents, 2013).

Relationship skills allow the parent and child to have a healthy relationship and in turn the child is in a better position to establish healthy relations with others. Parents should be respectful and encourage autonomy.

The child should be encouraged to understand their sense of purpose in life and reminded that they are self sufficient. Other skills that are vital in parenting include stress management, behavior management, safety and support of spiritual development (Golombok, 2000).

Communication quality and parenting

Communication is a key aspect in ensuring good parenting. Failure to communicate effectively leads to conflicts due to lack of understanding between the parties involved. Communication between a parent and a child should be open, and should not require the presence of a mediator. The right quality of interactions and communication affects the positive growth of a child.

Communication calls for the parent to be attentive to emerging needs and changes. The parent should simply listen to the child. The quality of relationships which children make is directly linked with parenting. Communication ensures that both the parent and child are aware of their environments and are in a position to express themselves adequately irrespective of the situations (Macklem, 2008).

Media and parenting

The medias’ role in parenting has recently evolved over the years. The media has played an important role in parenting in several ways. Parents are increasingly looking to the media for information on child rearing through access to a wide array of topics on parenting. Parenting information is available online where parents can borrow lessons from true stories and other experienced parents.

Psychologists also offer chunks of advice to assist parents in child growth and development. The TV also provides a considerable amount of content on parenting which parents can learn from. The print media equally discusses topics on child rearing and other child related stories. Several media owners in the print industry have devoted several pages to discussions on issues relating to family life (Simpson, n.d., para 11).

Despite the positive influence of media, there are several challenges that the media has generated. TV has largely been viewed as the major source of parenting advice hence overlooking other important aspects that build parenting like family and religion.

Sometimes, application of parenting advice varies from situation to situation. Therefore, what is portrayed in the media may be confusing and fail to apply efficiently in different situations. This implies that parents should not treat the media as ‘gospel truth’ hence they should discern what is right and applicable (DeGaetano,2004).

10 Skills of Competent Parents. (2013). Web.

Balter, L. (2000). Parenthood in America: An Encyclopaedia. California, USA: ABC, CLIO.

Bjorklund, D. F. ,& Blasi, C. H (2011). Child and Adolescent Development: An Integrated Approach. California:,USA:Cengage Learning.

Brooks, J. (2000). Parenting. USA: Mc Graw-hill.

DeGaetano, G. (2004). Parenting Well in a Media Age: Keeping our Kids Human. California, USA: Personhood Press.

Fisher, C. B. , & Lerner, R. M. (2004). Encyclopaedia of Applied Developmental Science. USA: Sage Publications Ltd.

Golombok, S. (2000). Parenting: What Really Counts? New York, USA: Taylor and Francis Group.

Guhl, B. , & Fontenelle, D. H. (2000). Purrfect Parenting. Arizona, USA: Fisher Books.

Luster, T., & Okagaki, L. (2005). Parenting: An Ecological Perspective. New Jersey, USA: Routlege.

Macklem, G. L. (2008). Practitioner’s Guide to Emotion Regulation in School-Aged Children. Massachusetts, USA: Springer.

Parenting Today. (2013). Web.

Schaffer, D. (2009). Social and Personality Development. California, USA: Cengage Learning.

Schaffer, D. R., & Kipp, K. (2009). Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence. California, USA: Cengage Learning.

Sigelman, C. K., & Rider, E. A. (2011). Life Span Human Development. California, USA: Cengage Learning.

Simpson, A. R. Role of Mass Media in Parenting Education. Web.

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  • Authoritarian vs. Permissive Parenting Styles
  • Child-rearing Practices of Major Cultural Groups in the United States
  • Analysis of Bullying and Parenting Style
  • Parenting Style in Japan and USA
  • Four Styles of Parenting
  • Parenting Styles and Overweight Status
  • Effects of Childhood Experiences on Self Injurious Behavior in Adulthood
  • Overmedication in School-Age Children
  • Comparison of Preschool and Middle School Child Development
  • Diagnosis in Child Psychopathology
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2018 Theses Doctoral

Essays on the Role of Parents in Educational Outcomes and Inequality

Chan, Eric Wai Kin

Parents have been shown to be a crucial driver in a child's educational outcomes in both the economics and education literature. However, researchers have yet to understand the roles that educational interventions, information, and policies might have on parental behavior and engagement toward their child's education and, in turn, how to effectively promote parental engagement for the benefits of children. In my dissertation, I examine how educational interventions and policies can impact the behavior and decision-making of parents and in turn affect student achievement. Specifically, I add to the scholarly literature evidence on (a) how being identified as gifted student affect parental levels of engagement and time investments, (b) how timely information about academic progress might change parental behaviors and improve educational outcomes, and (c) how immigrant mothers react to an expansion of pre-K specifically targeted at their children. Chapter one examines the short-term and long-term effects of an elementary school gifted education program in California that clusters 6-8 gifted students in classrooms. While I examine the academic effects of the program, I emphasize the analysis on the role of parent engagement and time investments in the lives of gifted children. While the gifted education literature has studied the causal effects of programs, there is limited evidence on how parent engagement might change as a result of these programs and its potential as a mechanism for achievement effects. Therefore, this study contributes to the economic debate of whether parent engagement is a complement or substitute to education quality. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach, I primarily find small to no evidence on short-term academic effects, but stronger effects on longer-term course-taking and college outcomes. On the parent side, I find that while most parents are not more engaged overall, parents of minority gifted children and low-socioeconomic students are. The implication is that there is heterogeneity in the manner by which parents react behaviorally to students that are identified as gifted. In Chapter two, a joint paper with Peter Bergman, we run a randomized controlled trial in West Virginia examining the effects of a high-frequency academic information intervention on middle and high school student' academic outcomes. In this field experiment, we send out three types of alerts to parents - weekly missing assignments, weekly class absences, and monthly low grade average - during the 2015-16 school year. We find that the intervention reduces course failures by 38%, increases class attendance by 17%, and increases retention. We find no evidence that test scores improve, but find that there are significant improvements on in-class exam scores. The evidence of improvement in test scores show that there are information frictions between parent and child, and thus parents may have inaccurate beliefs about their child's abilities due to a lack of complete information. Chapter three examines the maternal labor supply and pre-K enrollment effects of a bilingual pre-K policy implemented in Illinois during the 2010-11 school year, which came after the implementation of a statewide universal pre-K program in 2007. Research has shown the importance of quality preschool in the development of a child, with minorities particularly sensitive to the prevalence of quality early childhood education. In this study, I exploit variation in a policy mandating that any school with at least twenty identified English Language Learner student of a particular language is required to open up a bilingual classroom for those students. Using multiple control groups and various difference-in-differences specifications, I find that there is little to no change in maternal labor supply among Hispanics and recent immigrants, including the probability of being in the labor force, hours worked per week, and wage and salary income. However, I also find a significant and robust increase of 18-20 percentage points in the enrollment of 3- and 4-year old children into pre-K programs in Illinois. This result shows that, even in a state where there is universal access to pre-K, the design of such policies might not have sufficient reach to high-need parents. Taken together, this dissertation helps deepen our understanding of the various roles parents might affect educational outcomes and inequality. As my results demonstrate, there are various ways which help and incentivize parents to react in a manner that will improve childhood and long-term outcomes. Whether by programs, information, or public policy, the tools are many, yet it is crucial that scholarly work continues to dive deeper into how parents, children, and other stakeholders react.

  • Education and state
  • School management and organization
  • Educational equalization
  • Education--Parent participation

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Importance Of Parents Essay

The Importance of The Parent 's Role to The Children Why the role of parent’s is important for children? The first education center is from family environment. Parents will be a role models for children, usually the behavior of a child will imitate both parents. So the role of parents is to provide good examples and habits that can be an example for their children. This role can be done in various ways such as giving advice to children, follow the development of children and direct the child with his or her future. So as a parent we should know the role to take care our children. However there are some of parents who do not understand about the role, so they were assumed the role becomes unimportant even ignore it. It can be seen from several …show more content…

Actually this is still concerned with the first factor. Usually in a adequate families have one or more a housemaid. Beside their main duties taking care of matters, such as cooking, washing, ironing clothes, and cleaning the yard, they are often tasked with caring for children. Even we meet there are baby sitters in handing out special duties to take care of their young child, because both of parents are busy working out doors. Therefore, the housemaid or baby sitter are involved in the education of children in the family . For reasons of busyness, then the housemaid are become an alternative solution to replace the role of parents while busy to work. So what happens when the character and behavior of children is dominated by their characters rather than parental characters?. The fault is in the parents it self, all matters left to the housemaid. It should not be like that, there are some things that the parents must carry out their roles and responsibilities themselves. The housemaid is need an orientation before she actually works. Although the role was given is very much different, at least they do not feel lonely when the parents are busy to working. With the replacement of parent’s role, most of children have a close relationship with their

The Importance Of Parenting In The Glass Castle

Parenting is one of the most important if not the most important responsibility someone can undertake. A good parent is responsible for the physical and emotional development of a child who in the beginning is totally dependent on parents. Parenting is not an easy job. If you are incapable of this responsibility, you should not be a parent. At the beginning of her book, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls, her parents were incapable of providing a safe environment for their young, innocent children.

The Secret To Not Getting Stuck Jay Woodruff Analysis

Making countless mistakes is part of being a parent, there is no definition for a perfect one. The characteristics of a “good” parent do emerge throughout literature and in the world around us. “The Secret to Not Getting Stuck” by Jay Woodruff is a short story in which a teenager deals with his dysfunctional drunk of a father all the while pursuing his own passions in life. Through his struggle with his father’s demise, his mother embodies what it is to be a good parent. She continues to be strong and resilient for her grieving son while letting him pursue his passions.

Mexican American Child Abuse Case Study

There’s no typical family as nuclear families as in the past and not everyone lives in a multigenerational household. Same-sex families are also on the rise as sexual ambiguity is undergoing its own wave of acceptance in all political, social, and economic spheres. With the absence of the parents’ presence in the home due to an inability effectively balance work and home life, children could develop an emotional void/absence. Good communicative dialogue between children and their parents where the adults describe their work situation as it relates to the home to create resilient children, could possibly benefit the household.

Miltown Research Paper

Being a housewife means doing housework and taking care of children is a 24 hours job, seven days a week, a never ending job, unlike when these women had jobs outside of their homes

Border Culture

But, when the house is all male, who is doing the domestic work? Out of necessity the men have to learn how to do household duties such as cooking, ironing, grocery shopping, and cleaning for the first time in their life which represents a big role change for them. In addition to these domestic tasks, “most of them also held restaurant jobs, where they worked busing tables, washing dishes, preparing food, and cooking: these work experiences also widened their repertoire of domestic skills”. (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 408) Culturally, their mom and/or their sisters would be the ones to take care of these tasks when they were younger and then once they are married it becomes the wife’s responsibility. With the absence of women in these bachelor communities, the men are forced to do things for themselves.

The Role Of Family Roles In Ovid's Metamorphoses

In a family there are many different roles; there's the role of the mother, the father, the child, the grandparents, then there’s the brothers and sisters. Every single one of those roles has different responsibilities. The father, according to most of society, is supposed to be the breadwinner for the family. However, nowadays the mother is actually quite capable of being the breadwinner just as much of as the father. As they work to show their children what it is to be an adult they are teaching them as well on how to be an active member of society.

Analysis Of Social Inequality In The Film Good Will Hunting

The children learned basic norms and values from the parents. The parents supply the economic needs for the child such as foods and education (ResviseSociology, 2014). In a family, different person performs different role and function such as a mother should take care of her child. The important is the child can feel the love and support from their parents (Gordon, 1997). Family dysfunction may appear in broken families, violent families and divorced families, etc.

Divorced Hispanic Family

The child can learn by watching their parents delightful independence and new positive relationship. A new found relationship or single life can also be of some benefit to

To Kill A Mockingbird Role Of Parents Essay

Parents play a major role in a child’s life. Parents affect how their child behaves and who they become as they grow older. The ideal parent should be an attentive listener, have a positive attitude and love their child unconditionally. Firstly, I think that parents should always listen to their kids no matter what or else they will feel neglected.

Rhetorical Analysis Of Overprotective Parents

Becoming a parent is a task that cannot be taken lightly. It is a task filled with frustration, responsibilities and dedication, but is also filled with joy and satisfaction. From children learning how to behave to them going out with friends, rules, standards and expectations are set mostly by their parents. Parents make most of their children’s decision in the first couple of years from behalf from what they eat for breakfast from setting their curfew as they get older. As children began grow, they began to make their own choices and learn to deal with the consequence of their mistakes.

1.1 Explain The Importance Of The Support Of Parents And Carers

t is extremely important to have the support of parents and carers in a school, they are a valuable resource .The parents and primary carers will always be associated with being the child’s first educators and being the people who know their children best. Other people may disagree. Parents and carers see their children at their best and worse, they will know most things about them this information can then be passed on to the school this will enable them to react and support the child /young person . it is effectively working as a partnership with the school and will benefit the child and young person.

How My Mom Impacted My Life Essay

There have been many people in my life who have impacted it both negatively and positively, but no one has had an impact in my life greater than my mom. This woman is just amazing in my eyes, right from the beginning because of the way she raised me, if I had children I would raise them the same way she raised me. The person she is, in general, has really had a great effect in my life, and also how she has always told me about the struggles shes had in her life from the ones I didn't see to the ones I have seen with my own eyes. I believe if I didn't know my mother as well as I do, she wouldn't have influenced me as much as she does. The way my mom raised me has made me the person I am today, so if I were to say she didn't impact my life I would be lying.

Essay On Family Values

I believe that every family has their own roots, essence, uniqueness, beliefs and thoughts, some families have both parents, some just the mother, just the father, two mothers or two fathers, they might have an only child or two, or maybe 5 or even 10, therefore, those children start learning all these things from their family and surroundings, they ask questions, they imitate each other’s actions and are constantly learning and trying to catch as much information and experiences as possible. Children are growing fast, their parents are their role models, they learn mostly from them; parents have the tremendous job of forming good citizens that provide to society, healthy and happy beings that keep growing as humans in every stage of their

Essay On Parent Teacher Relationships

EFFECTS OF PARENTS AND TEACHERS INTRACTION ON DELOPMENT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD STUDENTS IN MIANWALI 1.1 Introduction: The importance of good parent-teacher relationships has been well documented. Research has shown that parent involvement in education benefits not only the child but also the parents and teachers (Eldridge, 2001). The function of a good parent-teacher relationship is much more than just like a vehicle for status reports from teacher to parents on a child’s performance.

First Blame The Parents Analysis

Fakhri Rajab article "First Blame the Parents" is about how parents rely on maids and servants .The author discusses how parents hold maids and servants responsible for everything in the house. The article also shows kids now a day have everything done for them and how that might affect them in the future . Fahkri sees that maid hold beyond their responsibility and they don’t have enough time to spend with themselves. The author finds that some of the tasks performed by maids should be done by parents.

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Importance Of Parents In Life

The importance of parents in life is depending on our sanskars and thinking. They play the biggest role in our development. Father and mother play an important role in our mental, physical, social, financial and career development. Parents are the most precious gift of God for us. They help us in every step of our life, they trained us very hard style for future challenges. Parents are living for us, they are real God and our first teacher parenting a child is not easy. We should respect them and their decisions in life.

IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS WHEN WE’RE CHILD 

In the development of the child, they play many roles. They provide everything that is helpful in our development like milk, fruits, proper food from time 2 time for our physical growth and sometimes they don’t have the money for the things that we want but they manage to provide all those things to their child which are beyond their capacity to provide. They teach and explain practically and theoretically about the rituals and sanskars which are helping today in our life. 

PARENTS HELP TO MAKE US EDUCATED

Parents do almost all the things to make us educated and well respected in society. They work hard day and night for their children education and feel proud of us when we got good marks . their guidance and support help us to live the life we always wanted. 

GUIDE IN ADOLESCENCE 

This is the most tensioned situation for parents and most enjoyable for teenagers. We do lots of mistakes in this age, we try to convince parents every time for our activities with the outer world such as outing with friends, living with a friend and doing other activities that parents think is not a good and bad company of people and friends drive our life in the wrong direction. So in this age, It is really important to us that we should communicate about our feelings to parents and parents also need to talk to their kids in teenage. 

WHEN WE’RE IN TOUGH SITUATIONS 

When we did something wrong they scold us but they support us in a difficult time in life. They try to make a balance in our emotional persistent that helps to improve the tough situation faster. They are the real leader in our life and never show off this to us and never dominate our feelings. They are only who support us in each and every step in our life with smiles and happiness. 

IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS IN DECISIONs 

When we’re confused in life they help us what to do or what not to do? They help us in taking the important decision of life like marriage, job, business, etc. They want a happy life for us  

So, It is important that we should love and respect their feelings, follow and remember their guidance and those compromises which they are doing or did for us. Respect your parents, believe in them and please share the importance of parents in life with others.

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Why stop using the behaviour clip chart, love and respect for parents.

Essay On Parents Day For Students In Easy Words

  • January 1, 2022

essay on the importance of parents

Parents Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of November. It is a day to celebrate all parents, whether they are biological or adoptive, and it’s also a day to thank them for everything they do for us.

The parent essay sample is an easy essay on parents day for students. It is a short essay that can be written by students to express their feelings about the importance of their parents in their lives.

Introduction:

Every year, the aim of commemorating Parent’s Day is to make a person aware of his or her parents’ love, sacrifice, and devotion, as well as to arouse a sense of affection for them.

Parents’ Day was first observed in 1994, and it has been observed every year since then in nations all around the globe. Our parents are our God, and it is everyone’s responsibility to adore Him. Parents provide the most significant influence to a person’s existence.

The Origins of Parents’ Day

essay on the importance of parents

Why is Parent’s Day Observed?

Parents are those who devote their whole life to their offspring. They labor tirelessly throughout their lives to ensure that their children have a comfortable life. Mutual understanding in the family must enhance the love and understanding between children and parents.

Children learn the value of their parents by commemorating Parents Day. Every minute, our parents teach us something new, and it is our ultimate responsibility to adore them. On this day, children should do something unique for their parents and make them feel special.

Parents’ Importance

There is no one greater in this world than parents, since they give up all of their pleasure for the happiness of their children. Parents never allow their children to be harmed, regardless of the circumstances.

Every parent in the world has just one wish: for their children to continually achieve new levels of achievement and development. Regardless of their preferences, parents devote their whole life to their children’s development.

At the same time, children cannot afford to pay their parents for lifetime favors, therefore everyone should respect and follow their parents’ commands.

Dodgy Parents

1625965490_197_Essay-On-Parents-Day-For-Students-In-Easy-Words-8211

Parents are compared to God because they are the first to teach us what is good and evil, right and wrong in life, and having a parent is more valuable than any material possession.

What Is The Best Way To Celebrate A Parent’s Day?

Play or other methods are used in different schools to improve cooperation between children and their parents. On Parents’ Day, students at school deliver a heartfelt tribute to their parents, emphasizing the significance of their presence in their lives.

On this day, children offer their parents flowers, cards, and presents. Parent’s Day is a wonderful opportunity for children to express gratitude to their parents for providing them life, love, affection, support, and care.

Conclusion:

Only your parents can unconditionally love you in this world. Our parents’ love is impossible to quantify or express in words.

The respect of parents essay in english is a short essay that discusses the importance of respecting parents. It was written by an author who has experience with children and their families.

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Parenting Matters

Supporting parents of children ages 0-8.

A father reading to his children

Parents are among the most important people in the lives of young children. Parents include mothers and fathers, as well as other caregivers who act as parents. From birth, children rely on parents to provide them with the care they need to be happy and healthy, and to grow and develop well. But parents sometimes lack information and the support that they need for good parenting.

The Centers for Disease and Prevention and other government agencies asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to review published information on parenting. The NASEM recently reported on what they found out about effective parenting practices and on how best to support parents .  Read the report  Parenting Matters: Supporting Parents of Children Ages 0-8.

Effective Parenting Practices

Parenting takes many different forms, but some parenting practices work well across diverse families and settings. The committee’s report looked at the evidence in the scientific literature and found these key ways parents can support their child’s healthy development:

  • Following the child’s lead and responding in a predictable way
  • Showing warmth and sensitivity
  • Having routines and household rules
  • Sharing books and talking with children
  • Supporting health and safety
  • Using appropriate discipline without harshness

Based on the information in the published studies, parents who use these practices can help their child stay healthy, be safe, and be successful in many areas—emotional, behavioral, cognitive , and social.

Elements of Effective Interventions

Parenting Matters Report Cover

Parents need support. Intervention programs and services can help, although they need to be based on approaches that have been rigorously tested and shown to work. The committee’s report looked at the evidence backing up various intervention programs and services, and identified the features and practices of effective parenting interventions. These intervention programs help parents by using practices that make it easier for parents to attend and participate. Parents have diverse needs; no single approach is right for all parents. But the committee found several factors that have been successful among a wide range of intervention programs and services:

  • Treating parents as equal partners when figuring out which services most benefit them and their children
  • Making sure that programs meet the specific needs of families
  • Making sure that families with multiple service needs receive coordinated services
  • Creating opportunities for parents to connect with and receive support from other parents with similar circumstances
  • Addressing trauma in order to prevent it from interfering with parenting and healthy child development
  • Making sure that programs are well suited for the diverse cultures of families
  • Enhancing efforts to involve fathers

The report found that more research is needed, particularly about what works best for different parents. More information is also needed to understand how effective services can become more widely available.  The committee created recommendations for next steps to fill various gaps in research and information. Read the report, including the findings and recommendations.

The report was sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families, Bezos Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Foundation for Child Development, Health Resources and Services Administration, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

For More Information

  • Positive Parenting Tips
  • Information for Parents
  • Essentials for Parenting Toddlers and Preschoolers

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Essay on Importance of Family in 500 Words

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  • Mar 8, 2024

Essay on Importance of Family

Essay on Importance of Family: Family always comes first; everything else is secondary. The importance of family can be seen in the fact that a family always provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support. Family members take care of each other and provide security from external and internal threats. What we learn from family forms the foundation of our personality.

The importance of family can be seen from the fact that they are our first hope. To make the entire world a better place, the Indian Prime Minister emphasized the importance of family by highlighting the Sanskrit term ‘Vasudevakutumbakam’ . It means the ‘World is one family. ’ It states that your family is not limited to those with whom you share blood; every human is connected to others in some way.

This Blog Includes:

Importance of family support, joint and nuclear families, 10 lines on the importance of family.

‘A Place Where Someone Still Thinks Of You Is A Place You Can Call Home.’ – Unknown

Family support is crucial at every stage in life. Right from the moment we are born, family support empowers us to understand the world around us. Every moment of life requires strong family support; from joy to challenges. 

Our family lays the foundation of our personality. The kind of person we become is completely determined by the family support and care we have received. A family is responsible for a child’s first educational environment. Family teaches us important values and principles. We learn about our identity and the world around us from our family. Our emotional, social, and cognitive activities are shaped by the developments taking place in our family.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Families are of two types; joint families and nuclear families. Joint families are large or extended nuclear families where grandparents, parents, and children live together. Sometimes nuclear families also include uncle and aunt. 

Nuclear families, on the other hand, are small families, which consist of parents and children. In today’s busy world, nuclear families have become more prevalent as children step out of their houses for study and occupation purposes. 

In a joint family, relationships go beyond the nuclear family unit, fostering a broader support system that withstands the test of time. Nuclear and joint families have their advantages and challenges. Whether you are living in a nuclear or joint family, both are your blood. You need to take care of your family and keep them happy.

Also Read: Essay on Family in 100, 200 & 300 Words

Family and Happiness

Spending time with family brings happiness and satisfaction. Our family’s love, support, and encouragement help enhance self-esteem and confidence to face challenges and lead a positive life. Strong family connections are important for a happier life. 

Our family’s unconditional love lays the foundation for happiness. Feeling accepted and valued for who you are, regardless of successes or failures, enhances overall well-being. This love serves as a constant, supporting individuals through life’s challenges.

The importance of family can vary from person to person. Some families are sensitive towards their children while others want their children to learn from the developments around them. In both cases, families are taking care of their children. Our family is our first hope. Therefore, accepting and valuing family support is important for a successful and happy life. 

Also Read: Essay on Women in Sports

Here are 10 lines on the importance of family. Students can add them in their essays on the importance of family or similar topics.

  • Our family is our world.
  • Family always comes first.
  • Our family lays the foundation of our growth.
  • Our family is our first hope.
  • Our family provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support.
  • Family support is crucial to deal with challenging situations.
  • The kind of person we become is completely determined by the family support and care we have received.
  • The world can become a better place if we accept the entire world as a family.
  • Spending time with family brings happiness and satisfaction.
  • Our family’s unconditional love lays the foundation for happiness.

Ans: The importance of family can vary from person to person. Some families are sensitive towards their children while others want their children to learn from the developments around them. In both cases, families are taking care of their children. Our family is our first hope. Therefore, accepting and valuing family support is important for a successful and happy life. 

Ans: Our family is our world. Family always comes first. Our family lays the foundation of our growth. Our family is our first hope. Our family provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support. Family support is crucial to deal with challenging situations.

Ans: Our family is our first hope. They provide us with emotional, moral, and financial support in every possible situation. Taking care of our loved ones must be our priority, as it shows how much we care for them.

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With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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  • Essay on My Parents: 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 Words

In This Blog We Will Discuss

Short Essay on My Parents for Class 1, 2, 3 (100 Words)

 We have come to this world because of our parents, they gave us birth. They are the most important and close people for us in this world. Both father and mother have lots of sacrifices and hard work behind this position. I will tell you about my parents here. My parents are really nice people.

They love me a lot. My mother name is Sunita Mehta and she is forty years old. She is a well-educated woman and working as a professor at the nearest college. She used to be busy with her work. My father is a businessman. Both of them love to spend their time with me after work. I love them a lot.

Essay on My Parents for Class 4, 5 (200 Words)

Essay on My Parents in 200 Words

Introduction: Parents are the most important person for us in this world. We need to respect and love our parents. We have none except them. They love us a lot. Most of the time they don’t express their love directly for the kids, but we can realize that easily. Especially fathers are like hard and never express love openly. But we have to realize that they love us a lot. We need to love and respect them too. Today I am going to share about my parents.  

My Parents: My father name is Sunil Sharma and he is forty-five years old. He is working as an engineer for the local government. He is pretty successful in his career. I wish to be an engineer like him, that’s my aim in life. My father is an ideal person. I follow his lifestyle and want to be like him.

He loves me a lot and loves to spend time with me. When he gets the free time he spends this time with the family. My mother name is Sneha Sharma, she is forty years old and she is a housewife. My mother is a hardworking woman and she is really polite and well behaved.  

Conclusion: They love me a lot and I love them too. They are the most important part of my life. I can’t think even a single day without them.

Essay on My Parents for Class 6, 7 (300 Words)

Essay on My Parents in 300 Words

Introduction : My parents are my world. Everyone has parents and they should respect and love their parents. Today I will share something about my parents. They are really special to me. They mean a lot to my life. I can’t deny their contribution whatever they have done for me and my life.  

My Father: My father name is Arun Roy and he is a teacher in a local high school. He is forty-five years old. In this age, he is really strong and healthy. The most important thing behind this good health is a regular workout. He goes to the gym and does a proper workout.

Most of the time he wakes me up early in the morning and takes me to a morning walk. I really enjoy this. I wish to become like my father. He is an ideal person and everyone loves him. He is very helpful and because of this nature people come and ask for different types of help. He never refuses anyone.  

My Mother : My mother name is Susmita Roy; she is forty years old housewife. I think my mom is the most important member of our family. We couldn’t even think a day without her. She wakes up early in the morning and starts working in the kitchen. She washes clothes, cleans the whole home, cooks food for us.

She is like a superwoman. I can’t even imagine doing so many works like her. She is really impressive. After doing so many works, she never complains. She is always happy. Especially when she finds me happy, she is the happiest.  

Conclusion: Both of my father and mother are really important to me. I can’t even think a day except them. I wish them to live longer.

Essay on My Parents for Class 8 (400 Words)

Essay on My Parents in 400 Words

Introduction: Parents are the most important part of our life. We can’t imagine anyone else is too much rather than our parents. They are the closest human for us. They sacrifice so many things to make us happy. They don’t enjoy their life too much. They always focus on how kids become happy and do everything for this. We should love our parents and respect them because it’s really important to love them.  

My Parents: My father name is Aditya Roy, and he is forty-five years old. But my father looks so much younger. He is very aware of his health. The goes to the gym regularly. I am also learning so much health things from him. He is a businessman and spends most of his time in his office, but after all, he loves to spend time with me and my mother. My mother name is Koli Roy, she is forty years old.

My mom is a housewife. She does lots of family works. She was working for a school as an assistant teacher. But she left the job to maintain the family better. That’s mean she sacrifice her career because of the family. She is the most interesting and beautiful woman I have ever seen.  

Their Hobbies: As like others my parents also have some unique hobbies, my hobby is always reading books and playing video games. My father’s biggest hobby is bodybuilding. Except for doing this, he loves reading books. In this leisure time, he starts reading books. We have got a small family library. I am also a book lover. And that’s why he buys books every month. My father leads me to become a book lover.

He always inspired me to read more and more. My mother has something different interest, it’s gardening. As a result, we have got a garden in front of our home. It looks really beautiful. I love working in the garden. When my mom works there, I help her a lot. I love the flowers and she is seeding some vegetables too.  

Conclusion: Both parents are really helpful and nice people. They behave with each other really well. I have never seen them quarrelling. Even they help the other peoples too. They have got a really good relationship with neighbours and our relatives too.    

My Parents Essay for Class 9, 10 (500 Words)

Essay on My Parents in 500 Words

Introduction: We have come to this world, because of our parents. We need to be pleased with the entire life, because of this reason. Mother has tolerated so much pain to give us birth. Today I am going to share everything about my father and mother. They are a really awesome and amazing person. I can’t think of my life without them. They have brought light into my life. They are like a guide who is guiding me into the light.  

My Mother : My mother name is Rokeya Begum. She is a housewife. My mother is an educated woman. She was working as a primary school teacher. But she left the job for taking care of us. This is a very big sacrifice for the family. She is forty years old, but she looks much younger. My mother is aware of her health, he wakes up early in the morning and goes for a little walk. And then she starts working.

I have seen that she works almost all the time in a day. We all have rest, but she doesn’t. Sometimes my sister helps her in the kitchen, but she does the main works. She is a very kind and loving woman. She loves poor people and helps them a lot. She is very good with the neighbours. She was keeping a great relationship with our relative.  

My Father: My father name is Jahid Ahmed. He is a businessman. We have two shops in the main market. He used to spend his time there. My father is always busy. But after all of his work when he gets time, we love to spend that time with us. Most of the time he takes us to a small picnic. I love the family picnic a lot. I really enjoy these.

My father is a friend to me. His behaviour is really good. Not only me, but he also behaves well with everyone. He is very popular in the society because of his helping mentality. Lots of people ask for help and he never refuses anyone. That’s why everyone loves him.  

Why My Mother is the Best Mother? Yeah, I consider my mother as the best mother in the world. She is the best. There are so many reasons behind that. First of all, I think she has sacrificed her happiness because of us. She works a whole like a robot, but she never complains. We always try our best to help her.

My father wanted to keep a maid, but my mother is not agreeing to waste money. She is my teacher and guide. When I face any problem she helps me and solves the problem. She is a really highly educated woman. She understands the value of education, and that’s why she is trying her best to make us educated.  

Conclusion: I love my parents very much. They are the best parents ever. I want my parents to live a long whole life. They also love me a lot.

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Essay on Parents Love

Students are often asked to write an essay on Parents Love in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Parents Love

Introduction.

Parents’ love is a unique kind of love that children receive. It’s a bond that begins even before we are born.

Unconditional Love

Parents’ love is unconditional. They love their children no matter what, without expecting anything in return.

Guidance and Support

Parents guide us through life. They support us in our endeavors and help us grow into better individuals.

Parents’ love also means protection. They always want to keep us safe from harm.

In conclusion, parents’ love is a vital part of our lives. It’s a love that stays with us forever.

250 Words Essay on Parents Love

The unconditional nature of parental love.

Parental love is an intricate tapestry woven with threads of care, sacrifice, and understanding. It is a unique form of affection that transcends all boundaries, making it an essential pillar in the development of a child’s emotional and psychological well-being.

The Sacrificial Aspect of Parental Love

Parents often sacrifice their needs and desires for the welfare of their children. This sacrifice is not just financial, but also emotional and physical. They give up their time, energy, and sometimes even their dreams, to ensure that their children have the best possible life. This selfless giving forms the bedrock of parental love.

Parental Love as a Guiding Beacon

Parents provide a moral compass to their children, guiding them through life’s labyrinth. Their love is like a beacon, illuminating the path for their children, helping them navigate through the storms of life. They teach by example, instilling values and principles that shape the character of their children.

Parental Love: A Catalyst for Growth

Parental love fosters confidence and self-esteem in children. It acts as a catalyst, promoting their overall growth and development. Children who experience consistent and unconditional love from their parents are more likely to develop into confident, compassionate, and well-rounded individuals.

In conclusion, parental love is a profound and complex emotion that forms the foundation of a child’s life. It is a blend of sacrifice, guidance, and nurturing that fosters growth and shapes the character of the next generation. Despite its challenges, the rewards of parental love are immeasurable and enduring.

500 Words Essay on Parents Love

The unparalleled essence of parental love.

Parental love, often viewed as the purest form of unconditional love, is a powerful force that shapes and molds an individual’s life. It is a love that transcends boundaries, a love that is selfless, and a love that is enduring. The significance of this love cannot be overstated, as it plays a crucial role in the development of a child’s emotional, psychological, and social well-being.

Unconditional Love: The Core of Parenthood

The essence of parental love is its unconditional nature. Parents love their children without any prerequisites or expectations. This love is not contingent on the child’s behavior, achievements, or attributes. It is a constant, unwavering force that remains even in the face of the greatest adversities. Parents continue to love their children even when they make mistakes, fail, or disappoint them. This unconditional love provides the child with a sense of security and belonging, which is essential for their emotional well-being.

The Role of Parental Love in Child Development

Parental love plays a pivotal role in the holistic development of a child. It is the foundation upon which a child’s self-esteem, self-worth, and self-confidence are built. Research has consistently shown that children who feel loved and cherished by their parents are more likely to develop healthy relationships, have a positive self-image, and exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence.

Moreover, parental love also influences a child’s psychological development. It helps in the formation of a secure attachment style, which is crucial for the development of healthy interpersonal relationships in adulthood. Children who receive consistent love and care from their parents are less likely to develop mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Parental Love: A Catalyst for Resilience

Parental love also acts as a catalyst for resilience in children. It provides them with the strength to face challenges, overcome adversities, and bounce back from failures. The love and support of parents give children the courage to explore the world around them, take risks, and learn from their mistakes. It instills in them the belief that they are capable of achieving their goals, thereby fostering resilience and perseverance.

Conclusion: The Enduring Impact of Parental Love

In conclusion, the love of a parent is a profound and enduring force that has a profound impact on a child’s life. It is a love that is unconditional, selfless, and enduring. It shapes a child’s emotional, psychological, and social development, and fosters resilience and perseverance. The love of a parent is a gift that continues to give, long after the child has grown and left the nest. It is a testament to the enduring power and significance of parental love.

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essay on the importance of parents

Competence or Experience The Missing Voice in Pediatric Decision-Making

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INTRODUCTION

One night in 2016, I fell sound asleep, then awoke to painkiller-induced, nightmarish hallucinations in the ICU. Despite being unable to identify myself or surroundings, I can clearly remember the discordant beeping of hospital monitors, acrid smell of saline wash, and taste of sickly sweet orange amoxicillin syrup. I was unaware that, the morning after I’d fallen asleep, I’d skied off an unmarked 30-foot cliff, breaking my legs, jaw, eye socket and nose, rupturing my right ear canal, and shattering nearly all of my teeth. Over the years that followed, I was fortunate enough to receive care from skilled, compassionate physicians. This not only allowed me to return to ski racing, but to dream of becoming a surgeon. Having grown older and thus more aware throughout my years as a pediatric patient, I’ve developed a nuanced understanding of what treatment made me feel heard.

In fact, I found the most radically varying aspect of my care to be the degree to which I was addressed as a conscious, capable individual versus an extension of my parents. This is unsurprising as the proper amount of authority lended to pediatric patients persists as highly disputed in bioethics. Over the course of this paper, several perspectives will be considered in order to evaluate the current position of the pediatric patient in medical decision-making. First, the ambiguity of maturity and reactions to pediatric autonomy will be considered through the Mature Minor Doctrine, especially important in the refusal of life-saving therapies. Next, the need for improved pain management, rooted in the misalignment of experienced and perceived pain in pediatric patients. Finally, this paper will prove, through the lenses of communitarianism and mosaic decision-making, the need for a more nuanced approach to pediatric care that structurally accounts for the patient’s voice without neglecting their place within a greater network. Therefore, there exists a great need for a more direct, balanced integration of pediatric patients’ as well as revisiting prevailing notions of where pediatric patients stand in relation to reason and experience.

To begin, Fleischman’s Pediatric Ethics opens with an exploration of what makes pediatric bioethics distinct. [1] Fleischman quickly runs into the most problematic of principles in the treatment of pediatric patients– autonomy. The ethical ambiguity of the degree of autonomy to offer pediatric patients and at what point in their lives is a central point of conflict. Many in favor of expanded authority point to the neurobiological similarity between young adults and late teenagers. [2] Furthermore, while parents are treated as natural decision-makers for their children, there are several cases of minors facing pressure to undergo medical treatment against their wishes. [3] , [4]  In response to these concerns, the Mature Minor Doctrine was created, a common law exception to the parental consent requirement. The doctrine allows a minor “to refuse or consent to medical treatment if [they possess] sufficient maturity to understand and appreciate the benefits and risks of the proposed medical treatment.” [5] The doctrine has spurred extensive and impassioned bioethical discourse, especially in relation to the refusal of life-saving therapies.

In “Health Care Decisionmaking by Children'', Ross draws a clear distinction between the notion of competence, often cited in psychological justifications of the Mature Minor Doctrine, and sound judgment. [6]  Her points against child liberationists can be simplified as follows: (a) children need time to develop virtues that preserve their life-time autonomy versus their present-day autonomy, (b) pediatric patients possess “limited world experience and so [their] decisions are not part of a well-conceived life plan,” [7] and (c) it serves parents and children alike for parents to make decisions in line with their view of a good life. I find all three points convincing, but each of them to be uniquely rooted in this same, critical lack of experience possessed by pediatric patients. I can attest to this. There were times where I suffered so desperately that I longed for relief by any means. I even told my mother that I was content only hearing out of one ear, willing to do anything to prevent another surgery. Now, I am fearful to imagine a world where, at my lowest, I had full autonomy.

Hence, the broad aversion to expanded pediatric autonomy is largely rooted in potential misuse, especially in the possibility of a unilateral, misinformed decision in favor of death via refusal of life-sustaining therapy. [8] , [9] Yet, one might argue, the desire for death has concrete rationale beyond lack of life experience— pain and suffering. As Foley describes, “The public's fear of pain and the media's portrayal that physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are the only reliable options for pain relief… demand that health care delivery systems commit their efforts to improve pain relief at an institutional level.” [10]  Indeed, the issue of insufficient pain management is all too common in pediatrics. One study comparing postoperative pain assessments surveyed 307 patients, 207 of whom were verbal. Across the board, nurses’ pain estimations produced significantly lower pain scores than parents and children, and were consistently closer to estimated pain scores of independent observers. [11] In another study, a total of 356 nurses across 22 Japanese PICUs were surveyed, and despite possessing a median of 4 years of experience, a mere 32.6% expressed confidence in their ability to accurately assess pain. [12]   It is alarming and telling that even in verbal pediatric patients, pain is significantly underestimated by medical personnel, reflecting a real gap in pediatric patient-professional communication. I can, again, personally attest to this. In the children’s ward, I was offered only Tylenol for severe nerve pain in my legs that kept me awake most nights.

Relatedly, the spirited debate in response to the Mature Minor Doctrine is somewhat disproportionate. Despite the suggestion of various commentators that the law broadly recognizes the doctrine or that states are trending in its direction, only eight states have adopted a mature minor exception, and even these states condition this authority greatly. [13] With this in mind, a crucial issue is illuminated– an aversion to the pediatric patient voice altogether. As Flesichman writes, “Children should be informed about the nature of their condition, the proposed treatment plan, and the expected outcome… appropriate to their developmental levels.” [14] Hence, it is vital to curtail pediatric autonomy in complex and life-threatening choices, but it is worth seriously considering that the current landscape might excessively minimize or avoid pediatric patients’ expression, merely serving to inform them rather than account for their voice.

The experience that pediatric patients do possess, in the form of knowing their body, past medical experiences, and thus present pain-related needs, is systemically underrepresented. This is a pressing issue. Before considering expansion of the pediatric voice, though, it is first important to consider the manner in which the patient’s capacity is further complicated by their role within a larger community. It is worthwhile explicitly mentioning communitarianism, a prevailing school of thought in modern bioethics, defined by Callahan as “a way of… assum[ing] that human beings are social animals… and whose lives are lived out within deeply penetrating social, political, and cultural institutions and practices.” [15] Pediatric patients present a uniquely communitarian case as the perspectives of parents and the needs of patients’ families are vital considerations in offering care. The pediatric patient’s role in a larger family unit and community should be kept in focus so long as the well-being of the patient isn’t compromised, such as in potentially life-threatening religious preferences, as the obligation of the physician is, first and foremost, to the patient.

Nonetheless, the status quo demands a more thoughtful and structural accounting of the pediatric voice to ensure that they feel heard and empowered in complex decision-making and regular care alike. Hence, it is necessary to develop and evaluate clinical models and frameworks that directly account for the pediatric voice, that integrate pediatric patients’ input as continuous, regular, and required elements of treatment. For instance, there may be promise in a model similar to that of mosaic decision-making, a means of restoring the capacity of reemergent patients following brain injury. Rather than enabling complete surrogate authority, the model would enable a pediatric patient’s emergent voice to be accommodated but to not “speak beyond its range and capabilities” via group deliberation between surrogate and patient, a medical professional, and a patient advocate. [16] Opting for such a model would enable the active involvement of pediatric input without excessively empowering the patient in a manner that neglects their communitarian role and lack of experience.

In the heated response to the largely unenforced mature minor doctrine, one finds the invaluable and lacking factor of experience in pediatric patients, especially in decisions to withdraw or refuse life-sustaining medical treatments. In this same response, however, one finds a sharp aversion to the pediatric voice, reflected in pervasive under-medication. Deficits in pain management must be addressed to more effectively treat discomfort, an effort bolstered by a more structural accounting of the pediatric voice and thus pain-related needs. Finally, frameworks that regularly involve the pediatric patient perspective while valuing their communitarian importance and lacking experience, such as the mosaic model, hold real promise moving forward.

[1] Fleischman, Alan. Pediatric Ethics: Protecting the Interests of Children. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September, 2016), p. 1-16.

[2] Coleman, Doriane & Rosoff, Philip. “The Legal Authority of Mature Minors to Consent to General Medical Treatment.” (Itasca: American Journal of Pediatrics, March  2013), p. 1.

[3] Hawkins, Susan. “Protecting the Rights and Interests of Competent Minors in Litigated Medical Treatment Disputes.” (New York: Fordham Law Review, March 1996), p. 1.

[4] Derish, Melinda & Heuvel, Kathleen. “Mature Minors Should Have the Right to Refuse Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment.” (Boston: The

Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, January 2021), p. 1-14.

[5] Derish, Melinda & Heuvel, Kathleen. “Mature Minors Should Have the Right to Refuse Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment.” p. 7.

[6] Ross, Lainie. “Health Care Decisionmaking by Children. Is It in Their Best Interest?” (Garrison: The Hastings Center Report, November-December 1997), p. 1-5.

[7] Ross. “Health Care Decisionmaking by Children''. p. 5.

[8] Penkower, Jessica. “The Potential Right of Chronically Ill Adolescents to Refuse Life-Saving Medical Treatment - Fatal Misuse of the Mature Minor Doctrine.” (Chicago: DePaul Law Review, 1996), p. 1-8.

[9] Burk, Josh. “Mature Minors, Medical Choice, and the Constitutional Right to Martyrdom.” (Charlottesville: Virginia Law Review, September 2016), p. 1-15.

[10] Foley, Kathleen. “Pain Relief Into Practice: Rhetoric Without Reform.” (Alexandria: Journal of Clinical Oncology, 1995), p. 1-3

[11] Hla et. al. “Perception of Pediatric Pain: A Comparison of Postoperative Pain Assessments Between Child, Parent, Nurse, and Independent Observer.” (Melbourne: Pediatric Anesthesia. 2014) p. 1-5.

[12] Tsuboi et. al. “Nurses' perception of pediatric pain and pain assessment in the Japanese PICU.” (Tokyo: Pediatrics International, February 2023), p. 1-3, 10-12.

[13] Coleman, Doriane & Rosoff, Philip. “The Legal Authority of Mature Minors”. p. 1-3.

[14] Fleischman, Alan. Pediatric Ethics . p. 115.

[15] Callahan, Daniel. “Principlism and communitarianism.” (Garrison: The Hastings Center  Report, October 2003), p. 2.

[16] Fins, Joseph. “Mosaic Decisionmaking and Reemergent Agency after Severe Brain  Injury”. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, September 2017), p. 6.

Jonathan Tenenbaum

Third place winner of Voices in Bioethics' 2023 persuasive essay contest. 

Disclaimer: These essays are submissions for the 2023 essay contest and have not undergone peer review or editing.

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The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending

Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.

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Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.

Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.

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But a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.

By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.

Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that city’s teachers’ union, sponsored a “teach-in.” A video trumpeting the event urged: “Apply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.” An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix students’ attention on Gaza.

Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled “ From Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us? ,” in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the students—in a predominantly Black and Latino school district—that the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. “Repression there ends up cycling back to repression here,” an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handala’s Return , described how a “group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”

The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her son’s middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read Teach Palestine .

Zolt Hara didn’t need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. She heard about incidents at her children’s schools. One kid walked up to a Jewish student playing what he called a “Nazi salute song” on his phone. Another said something in German and then added, “I don’t like your people.” A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian “teams,” and another announced that Palestinians couldn’t be friends with Jews.

On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Hara’s son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parent’s phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. “Are you Jewish?” one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. “No way,” the second kid replies. “I fucking hate them.” Another blurts, “Kill Israel.” A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of “KKK.”

photo of graffiti reading "Annihilate ISRAEL! stolen land"

On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldn’t identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their school’s walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people .

At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout “Free Palestine” at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, “There goes the Jew, taking everyone’s land.” I asked if he’d ever told any of this to an administrator. “Nothing would change,” he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didn’t doubt him.

Like many American Jews , I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent Jews—Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—as it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.

Trump’s victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trump’s election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C. , and proclaimed, “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting , “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot . The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi .

After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora.

From the May 2023 issue: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?

That reassuring thought required downplaying the anti-Semitism that had begun to appear on the left well before October 7—on college campuses, among progressive activists, even on the fringes of the Democratic Party. It required minimizing Representative Ilhan Omar’s insinuation about Jewish control of politics —“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”—as an ignorant gaffe. And it meant dismissing intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which coincided with tensions in the Middle East, as a passing storm.

Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country’s right wing, including its current ruling coalition.

photo of people hugging in street with uniformed police behind

Such criticisms were not those of a dissident— the majority of American Jews share them . The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.

Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.

I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic—especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite . The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt , who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme—especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7—and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism is a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God. It’s a tendency to fixate on Jews, to place them at the center of the narrative, overstating their role in society and describing them as the root cause of any unwanted phenomena—a centrality that seems strange, given that Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the global population. Though it shape-shifts over time, anti-Semitism returns to the same essential complaint: that Jews are cunning, bloodthirsty, and mad for power. Anti-Zionism often takes a similar form: the dehumanization, the unilateral casting of blame, and the fetishizing of Jewish villainy.

Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim . But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.

The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.

Nowhere is this more fully on display than in the Bay Area. After October 7, protesters flooded city-council meetings, demanding cease-fire resolutions and rejecting any attempt to include clauses condemning Hamas for the rape and murder of Jews. One viral video compiled enraged citizen comments at an Oakland city-council meeting. These citizens weren’t just showing solidarity for the people of Gaza, but angrily amplifying wild conspiracy theories. One woman declared, in the style of a 9/11 truther, that “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.” Another, in the manner of a Holocaust denier, described the events of that day as a “fabricated narrative.”

For months, the Berkeley city council resisted the pressure to pass a cease-fire resolution; the mayor regarded foreign policy as far beyond its jurisdiction . But the pressure grew so intense that the council could hardly conduct any other business. Protesters disrupted official meetings, forcing the mayor to keep adjourning deliberations to another room where the public was not allowed. Police offered to escort council members to their cars after meetings. The mayor’s unwillingness to condemn Israel was anomalous, even in his own city. On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire .

Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism has become part of the landscape. In 2021, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, owned by a progressive gay Jewish activist, was defaced with messages including Zionist pigz. After October 7, the windows of Smitten Ice Cream, owned by a Jewish woman, were smashed and spray-painted with the words Out the Mission .

photo of two people looking at debris from Oakland menorah on grass and sidewalk

During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water , replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert . Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled “The World We Wish to See.” What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which “all beings are treated with dignity.” But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words Zionist KILLER .

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.

I grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation’s sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank’s diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld . Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation’s population at the time , but I’d estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well. In 2000, Joe Lieberman, a Shabbat-observant Jew with a wife named Hadassah, fell 537 votes short of becoming vice president. None of these occurrences sparked a backlash worthy of note.

photo of Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander walking and talking on set with cameras

By the mid-’90s, experts had declared the end of anti-Semitism. It persisted, of course, in the dark corners of American political culture—in the wacky cosmology of the Nation of Islam and in the malevolent rantings of David Duke, the ubiquitous ex-Klansman—but that proved the point. The only Jew haters to be found were hopelessly fringe; anti-Semitism disappeared from polite conversation. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian who devoted his life’s work to studying anti-Semitism, concluded his magnum opus , published in 1994, with the admission that his scholarly obsession was becoming a relic: “It has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

That last sentence was an expression of triumphalism, rendered in the spirit of the times. Like the end of history, the end of anti-Semitism was a post–Cold War reverie, a naive declaration of a golden age without end. American Jews now worried that they might become too accepted. The great anxiety of the fin de siècle was intermarriage.

The threat of assimilation had frightened the Orthodox Jews who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the last decades of the 19th century. Fathers who had fled the Pale of Settlement feared that their sons would trade ancestral traditions for the allure of American culture. (A quite popular, very American musical is energized by these anxieties.) One of those sons, however, made it his intellectual project to find a way for Jews to enjoy the bounties of American society without having to fully abandon their Jewishness.

Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents’ wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a protégé.

Kallen’s breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot , a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil’s bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.

Yair Rosenberg: How to be anti-Semitic and get away with it

Kallen didn’t want to surrender his identity. He wasn’t religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard’s Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called “100 percent Americanism.” But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

photo of man in glasses and bow tie

That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen’s polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews , imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.

The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and ’40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.

The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion . Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally—opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism—tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.

Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II—and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide—a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget’s Thesaurus had listed cunning , rich , extortioner , and heretic as synonyms for Jew . At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment . It became cliché to refer to America as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” Quotas at universities fell to the side.

As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.

During the Golden Age, Jews created new genres of Americana, and in turn remade America’s image of itself, through the idealized vision of the heartland found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! ; the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. (To say that “the Jews” run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.) Only in America could Jews—Irving Berlin, George Wyle, Sammy Cahn—write the Christmas songbook.

It wasn’t just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times ’ Thomas Friedman has put it , American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”

A now-obscure cultural event captures, for me, this newfound sense of self and self-confidence. In 1978, ABC aired The Stars Salute Israel at 30 , a kitschy prime-time variety show filmed in front of a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles, the same venue that hosted the Oscars. Like the Oscars, it featured an A-list slate: Barry Manilow in a white suit, surrounded by backup singers in sequins; Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself, playing a rough-hewn Israeli in a sketch; and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Near the conclusion, Barbra Streisand emerged in a white gown to talk via remote hookup with Golda Meir as a camera filmed the former prime minister in a book-filled room in Israel—the two most celebrated Jewish women of the century kibitzing on American TV.

photo of Barbra Streisand in white gown on stage singing into microphone with orchestra in background

In the early decades of Hollywood, Jewish stars had hidden behind stage names—Emanuel Goldenberg performed as Edward G. Robinson; Issur Danielovitch transformed himself into Kirk Douglas. Streisand had also changed her name, dropping the a from Barbara, but that was an instance of a diva’s bravado, not a sop to the goyim. What made her stardom so emblematic of the Golden Age was that she never allowed herself to be bullied into suppressing her Jewish identity. Her crowning achievement was Yentl , an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story. For the grand finale of the ABC telecast , Streisand sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, for 18.7 million viewers. “The good feelings and the love will always remain,” she told them.

The Jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn’t stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.

But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.

This wasn’t fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush’s administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush’s Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard , were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for one, took exception to the idea that Jews were pulling the strings of the United States government. “I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,” he said.

In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy , a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute—the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.

One year later, Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Bavaria, collapsed. That news was followed by the revelation that Bernie Madoff had masterminded the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history. Although politicians, on the whole, refrained from casting Jews as the primary culprits of the 2008 financial crisis—which was, in fact, systemic—a sizable portion of the public harbored this thought. Stanford University professors conducted a survey that found that nearly a quarter of the country blamed Jews for crashing the global economy. Another 38.4 percent ascribed at least some fault to “the Jews.”

In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares. A fear of the mob suffused masterworks of the Golden Age—Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality , Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism , Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life . Haunted by the Holocaust and inherited memories of pogroms, these writers warned how a society might fall prey to a demagogue who tapped into prejudice.

After 2008, a version of their prophecy came to pass. The right settled on a Jewish billionaire as their villain of choice: George Soros. An idea took hold, and not just on extremist blogs. The mainstream of the Republican Party seeded the image of Soros as the “shadow puppet master,” in the words of the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. In elevating the figure of Soros and invoking him so frequently, Fox News and Republican politicians were also, intentionally or not, drawing on the deeply implanted imagery of the Jewish financier bankrolling the destruction of Christian civilization.

In 2018, Fox News began carrying images of migrant caravans headed from Central America toward Texas, a tide of humanity it described as an “invasion.” Though they had no evidence to bolster the charge, Republican politicians insinuated that the caravans were paid for by Soros. Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted a video of two men handing out cash to a line of Honduran migrants, accompanied by the question “Soros?” When President Trump was asked about Soros’s role in funding a caravan, a week after a pipe bomb was found in Soros’s mailbox, and days after the Tree of Life shooting, he told reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Soros was a central character in a new master narrative, much of it adapted from European sources. The spine of the story was borrowed from a French author named Renaud Camus, a socialist turned far-right reactionary who wrote a 2011 book called The Great Replacement , warning that elites intended to diminish the white Christian presence in Europe by flooding the continent with migrants. The Jews weren’t a central feature of Camus’ theory. But when elements of the American right embraced it, they inserted Soros and his fellow Jews as the masterminds of the elite plot. This became the basis for the chant “Jews will not replace us.”

Jews were the antagonists of the conspiracy theory because they occupied a special place in the bizarre racial hierarchy of American ethno-nationalism. Eric Ward, an activist who is among the most rigorous students of white supremacy, has put it this way: “At the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played.” That is, Jews were able to pass as white people, but they were really stealth agents working for the other side of the race war, using immigration to subvert white Christian hegemony.

This notion planted itself in the mind of Robert Bowers, a loner who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He became obsessed with the work of HIAS , originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It was formed in 1902 with the intention of easing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms. The group’s evolution was emblematic of the trajectory of Jewish liberalism. As American Jews settled into a comfortable existence in their new land, HIAS’s mission expanded. It has field offices in more than 20 countries, including a branch on a Greek island to tend to Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants. On October 19, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was participating in a National Refugee Shabbat, which was the brainchild of HIAS.

The event stoked Bowers’s rage. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote on Gab, the Christian-nationalist social-media site. Just before he entered the synagogue’s sanctuary, armed with three semiautomatic pistols and an AR‑15 rifle, he posted, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

archival photo of room full of people sitting at tables paying attention to man lecturing and pointing to American flag

A faith in immigration—the idea of America as a sanctuary for the refugee, the belief that subsequent groups of arrivals would experience the same up-from-the-shtetl trajectory—was a core tenet of Jewish liberalism. A Jewish poet had written the lines about huddled masses inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans. But now this ideal was the basis for Jews’ vilification. At the Tree of Life synagogue, it was used to justify their slaughter.

In the old Jewish theory of American politics, the best defense against the anti-Semitism of the right was a united left: minorities and liberal activists locking arms. When I was young, rabbis and elders reverently told us about the earnest young Jews in chunky glasses who had jumped aboard the Freedom Rides; about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his unmissable kippah, marching right next to Martin Luther King Jr.; and about the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews who had been murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, for their work registering Black Americans to vote. A coalition of the tolerant pressed the country to live up to its ideals.

Later, I would learn that those memories were a bit gauzy. In the late 1960s, former comrades began to quietly, then brusquely, discard this spirit of common cause. Younger activists in the civil-rights movement took a hard turn toward Black Power and dismissed the old liberal theory of change as a melioristic ruse. Anti-war protesters embraced the decolonization struggles of the developing world. After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.) Even as Israel’s shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America’s left turned on Israel.

The turmoil of the late ’60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.

This rupture was propelled by the menace of Donald Trump. His election jolted his opponents to take emergency measures. The left began describing itself as the Resistance, which implied a more confrontational style than that of Nancy Pelosi floor speeches or Center for American Progress white papers.

Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women’s March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble’s autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people. Tablet magazine later reported that Wruble was told that Jews needed to repent for their leading role in the slave trade—a fallacious charge long circulated by the Nation of Islam. (The two organizers denied making the reported statements.) That moment of tension never really subsided, either for Wruble or for the left.

When the march’s organizers published their “unity principles,” they emphasized the importance of intersectionality, a theory first introduced by the law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw . It would be insufficient, she argued, for courts to focus their efforts on one narrow target of discrimination when it takes so many forms—racism, sexism, homophobia—that tend to reinforce one another. Her analysis, incisive in the context of the law, was never intended to guide social movements. Transposed by activists to the gritty work of coalition-building, it became the basis for a new orthodoxy—one that was largely indifferent to Jews, and at times outwardly hostile.

When the Women’s March listed the various injustices it hoped to conquer on its way to a better world, anti-Semitism was absent. It was a curious omission, given the central role that Jews played in the conspiracies promoted by the MAGA right, and a telling one. Soon after the march, organizers pushed Wruble out of leadership. She later said that anti-Semitism was the reason for her ouster. (The organizers denied this charge.)

The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally. This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist , an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women’s March, put it, “We are not here to be bystanders.” To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.

photo of MLK in suit and tie holding up picture of three slain civil rights activists

The American left hadn’t always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.

Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions—not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as “anti-Zionist.”

Within the Jewish establishment, there’s a tendency to impute anti-Semitism to anyone who describes themselves that way. That has always struck me as intellectually imprecise and, occasionally, as a rhetorical gambit to close down debate. But there’s a reason so many Jews bristle at the thought of anti-Zionism finding a home on the American left: Zionist can start to sound like a synonym for Jew . Zionists stand accused of the same crimes that anti-Semites have attached to Jews since the birth of Christianity; Jews are portrayed as omnipotent, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Knowing the historical echoes, it’s hard not to worry that the anger might fixate on the Jewish target closest at hand—which, indeed, it has.

In 2014, dorms at NYU where religiously observant Jews lived received mock eviction notices—“We reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings,” read the flyer slipped under doors—as if intimidating college kids with unknown politics somehow represented a justifiable reprisal for Israeli-government action in the West Bank. The same notices appeared at Emory University, in Atlanta, in 2019. At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. “If you don’t support Palestinian liberation you don’t support survivors,” the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel’s existence. This wasn’t normal politics. It was evidence of bigotry.

Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the “Israeli war machine.” At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, “If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?” At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn’t be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel’s practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.

Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me

As exclusion of Jews became a more regular occurrence, the leadership of the left, and of universities for that matter, had little to say about the problem. To give the most generous explanation: Jews simply didn’t fit the analytic framework of the new left.

At its core, the intersectional left wanted to smash power structures. In the American context, it would be hard to place Jews among the ranks of the oppressed; in the Israeli context, they can be cast as the oppressor. Nazi Germany definitively excluded Jews from a category we now call “whiteness.” Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left’s does, will be dangerously blind to anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It’s a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means. In the annals of Jewish history, accusations of privilege are the basis for hate, the kindling for pogroms. But universities too often ignored this lesson from the past. Instead, they acted, as the British comedian David Baddiel put it in the title of his prescient book about progressive anti-Semitism, as if “ Jews don’t count .”

In the death spiral of liberalism, extremism on the right begets extremism on the left, which begets further extremism on the right. To protest the censoriousness of the new progressives, right-wing edgelords and trolls attempted to seize the mantle of liberty.

The most powerful of the edgelords was Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter ostensibly to save discourse from the woke mob. To make good on his noble aims, he reversed bans that the platform’s previous regime had imposed on the most vile anti-Semites, including the white nationalist Patrick Howley, the comic Sam Hyde, and the Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin. By restoring them to the site, Musk was, in essence, conceding that their words shouldn’t have been considered taboo in the first place. He legitimized their claims of victimhood, the sense that they had been excluded only because they’d offended the wrong people.

In fact, Musk hinted that he shared this conspiratorial view of censorship. In May 2023, he retweeted an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Those words were actually uttered by a neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom, not the French philosopher. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that the words had dubious origins, because they captured a view of the world in which shadowy forces furtively censor their enemies.

Nor was it hard to imagine that those shadowy forces might include the Anti-Defamation League, which relentlessly called attention to the proliferation of Jew hatred on Twitter under Musk’s ownership. Musk threatened to sue the group, accusing it of trying to “kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” The Jews, he all but spelled out, were those who couldn’t be criticized—which, by the logic of the Strom quote, made them society’s secret masters.

Musk wasn’t alone in this argument. In 2022, Dave Chappelle used the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live to muse about the cancellation of the hip-hop artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), who had lost a deal with Adidas after he promised, among other things, to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Chappelle exuded empathy for Ye. “I don’t want a sneaker deal, because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they’re going to take my sneakers away … I hope they don’t take anything away from me,” he said, adding with a smile and a conspiratorial whisper: “Whoever they are.” There was no mystery about his use of pronouns: “I’ve been to Hollywood … It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He went on, “You could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business.”

photo of Dave Chapelle with microphone opening SNL with band in background

Chappelle practices shock comedy as a form of shock therapy: The authoritarian impositions of the left justify offensive comments, which are a form of defiance. He has taken a genuine problem—anti-liberalism on the left—and used it as a pretext for smuggling anti-Semitism into acceptable discourse.

That Chappelle and Musk see fit to indulge anti-Semitism in order to protect freedom of speech contains a dark irony. In the 20th century, starting with Louis Brandeis’s dissents on the Supreme Court, Jews stood at the vanguard of the movement to protect “subversive advocacy,” even when it came at their own expense. This could be understood as a defense of the Talmudic tradition of disagreement, what Rabbi David Wolpe calls the “Jewish sacrament” of debate. The movement culminated in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when the ACLU deployed the lawyer David Goldberger to sue to allow neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb, which was filled with Holocaust survivors. The Jewish community was hardly unanimous on the Skokie question—unanimity would have been inconsistent with the tradition—but the ACLU position reflected a commitment to free speech officially espoused by major Jewish communal institutions in the postwar years.

In the Jewish vision of free speech, open interpretation and endless debate mark the path to knowledge; the proliferation of discourse is the antidote to bad ideas. But in the reality of social media, free speech also consists of Jew hatred that masquerades as comic entertainment, a way to capture the attention of young men eager to rebel against the strictures of what they decry as wokeness.

When I asked Oren Segal, who runs the ADL’s Center on Extremism, to point me to a state-of-the-art anti-Semitic hate group, he cited the Goyim Defense League. The spitefully silly name reflects its methods, which include pranks and stunts broadcast on its website, Goyim TV. Its leader sometimes dresses as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, calling himself the “Honest Rabbi.” In one demented piece of guerrilla theater, he apologizes on behalf of the Jewish people for fabricating stories about the Holocaust. The group has attempted to popularize the slogan “Kanye is right about the Jews,” hanging a banner proclaiming it on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles and projecting it on the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, as 75,000 fans filed out. GDL hecklers have stood in front of Florida synagogues and Holocaust museums, shouting, “Leave our country. Go back to Israel” and “Heil Hitler.”

In a short span, as the edgelords successfully pushed the limits, American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Anti-Semitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.

For a brief moment , it felt as if the October 7 attacks might reverse the tide, because it should have been impossible not to recoil at the footage of Hamas’s pogrom. Israel had yet to launch its counterattack, so there was no war to condemn. Still, even in this moment of moral clarity, the campus left couldn’t muster compassion. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter on October 7, holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Days later, the incoming head of NYU’s new Center for Indigenous Studies described the attacks as “affirming.” This sympathy for Hamas, when its crimes were freshest, was a glimpse of what was about to come.

On the afternoon of October 11, Rebecca Massel, a reporter at the Columbia Daily Spectator , received a tip. She was told that a woman, her face wrapped in a bandanna, had assaulted an Israeli student in front of Butler Library in a dispute over flyers depicting hostages held by Hamas. The woman’s alleged weapon was a broomstick. Her battle cry was said to be “Fuck all of you prick crackers.” After striking him with the broomstick, the man said, she attempted to punch him in the face. By the end of the fracas, she had bruised one of his hands and sprained a finger on the other.

Massel began to report out the story . She spoke with the victim, who told her, “Now, we have to handle the situation that campus is not a safe place for us anymore.” She spoke with the NYPD, which confirmed that it had arrested the woman, who was charged with hate crimes and has pleaded not guilty. Massel and her editors curbed their impulse to quickly score a scoop, double-checking every sentence. They didn’t publish the story until 3 a.m. on October 12.

Later that morning, Massel, a sophomore studying political science, was sitting in her Contemporary Civilization seminar when her phone lit up. It was her editor, calling her back. She had texted him to get his sense of the response her article had elicited, so she stepped out of class to hear what he had to say. She had already caught a glimpse of posts on social media, harping on her Jewishness and accusing her of having a “religious agenda.” She’d worried that these weren’t stray attacks. The editor told her the paper had been inundated. The messages it had received about the article were vitriolic, but he didn’t give her any specifics. Before returning to class, she checked her own email. A message read, “I hope you fucking get what you deserve … you racist freak.”

Read: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism

For as long as she could remember, Massel had wanted to be a journalist. She’d founded the newspaper at her elementary school. During high school, she’d read She Said , Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults. The New York Times reporters insisted that they were journalists, not feminist journalists. Massel vowed to take the same approach. The accusations of bias, therefore, didn’t just feel anti-Semitic. They felt like an attack on the integrity that she hoped would define her work.

But anger was an emotion for another day. At that moment, she was overwhelmed by fear. She thought about what the Israeli student had told her the day before. A dean had apparently advised him to leave campus because the university couldn’t guarantee his safety. Now Massel felt unsure of her own physical well-being. She decided that she would stay with her parents until she could get a better sense of the fury directed at her.

In her unnerved state, Massel threw herself into her journalism. She decided to interview Jewish students, from all corners of the university, to gauge their mood. After the office of public safety assured her that she could return to campus, she parked herself in the second-floor lounge of Columbia’s Hillel center. When she overheard a student mention an incident, she would approach them and ask to talk.

Over the course of two weeks, Massel spoke with 54 students . What she amassed was a tally of fear. Thirteen told her that they had felt harassed or attacked, either virtually or in person. (One passerby had barked “Fuck the Jews” at a small group of students.) Thirty-four reported that they felt targeted or unsafe on campus. (At one precarious moment, the Hillel center went into lockdown, out of concern that protesters might descend on the building.) Twelve said that they had suppressed markers of their Jewish identity, wearing a baseball cap over a yarmulke or tucking a Star of David necklace into a sweatshirt. She learned that a group of students had created a group-chat system to arrange escorts, so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe.

Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.” When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, “We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people … It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I’ll see you all on Zoom in a bit.” One student left class in the middle of a professor’s broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East–studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.

When I talked with Jewish students at Columbia, I was struck by how they, too, tended to speak in the language of the intersectional left. They described their “lived experience” and trauma: the pain they felt on October 7 as they learned of the attacks; the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel. They sincerely expected their university to respond with unabashed empathy, because that’s how it had responded in the past to other terrible events. Instead, Columbia greeted their pain with the soon-to-be-infamous concept of “context,” including a panel discussion that explained the attacks as the product of a long struggle. This historicizing felt as if it not only discounted Jewish students’ suffering but also regarded it as a moral failing. (In early November, in response to criticism, Columbia announced that it would create a task force on anti-Semitism.)

photo from back of student in kippah and backpack facing protest and people in street

There are many reasons for the unusual intensity of events at Columbia, which is located in a city that is a traditional bastion of the American left; its campus is where the late Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said achieved legendary status. But Columbia is also a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: It is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus.

The events on campus that followed October 7 were a sad coda to the Golden Age. When I was a student at Columbia, in the ’90s, the Ivy League was a primary plot point in a triumphalist tale. During the first half of the 20th century, Columbia had deployed extraordinary institutional energy to limit the presence of Jews. The modern college-application process was invented by Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler to more effectively weed out Jews. In the late ’20s, the university created an ersatz version of itself in Brooklyn, Seth Low Junior College, so that it could educate otherwise qualified Jewish applicants there, rather than having them mingle with the Gentiles in Morningside Heights. But once Columbia lifted its quotas after World War II, the Jewish presence swelled. By 1967, the student body was 40 percent Jewish. The institution that arguably had fought hardest to exclude them became a welcoming home.

But in the 21st century, the Jewish presence in the Ivy League has steadily receded . In the 2000s, Yale was 20 percent Jewish. The proportion is now about half that. The University of Pennsylvania went from being a third Jewish to about 16 percent. The reasons for that plummet aren’t nefarious. There has been a deliberate institutional drive to reengineer the elite, to provide opportunities to first-generation college students and students of color. Some Jews have chafed at this reengineering. But the concept of meritocracy that Jews celebrated was far from a pure reward for test scores and grades. Jewish alumni came to benefit from the same dynastic system of preference that their Protestant predecessors had taken advantage of. Their children applied from prestigious high schools, which maintained a cozy relationship with university admissions offices. It was a system that desperately required reforming in the name of fairness.

The problem exposed in the limp university response to campus anti-Semitism after October 7—distilled to then–Harvard President Claudine Gay’s phrase, “It depends on the context”—is that Jewish students aren’t just a diminished presence but a diminished priority. Whereas Jews thought of themselves as a vulnerable minority—perhaps not the most vulnerable, but certainly worthy of official concern—their academic communities apparently considered them too privileged to merit that status. This wasn’t just scary. It carried the sting of rejection.

There’s a number that haunts me. In 2022, the Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh conducted a comprehensive study of Jewish life on American college campuses, which surveyed both Jews and Gentiles. Hersh found that on campuses with a relatively high proportion of Jewish students, nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they “wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” They were saying, in essence, that they couldn’t be friends with the majority of Jews.

Each spring , during the Passover seder, Jews recite this phrase from the Haggadah: “In every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us.” To participate in the most universally observed of all Jewish rituals, a celebration of liberation and survival, is to be reminded of the grim cycle of Jewish history, in which golden ages are moments of dramatic irony, the naive complacency just before the onset of doom. Some of these moments are within living memory.

In 1933, the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith published a 1,060-page book meticulously enumerating the achievements of the community. It was quite a list. Weimar Germany is remembered as a period of instability, a time of beer-hall-putschists, louche cabarets, and rampant assassinations. But Weimar was also the pinnacle of Jewish power, a golden age in its own right, especially if one considers the whole of German culture, which sprawled across borders on the map. During the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish contributors to German music included Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg; to German literature, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin; to science, Albert Einstein. Jews presided over the Frankfurt School of social criticism and populated the Bauhaus school of art and architecture. The Central Union’s compendium could be read as the immodest self-congratulation of a people who represented 0.8 percent of the total population—or as a desperate, futile plea for Germany to return the love that Jews felt for the country.

Americans maintain a favorable opinion of Jews . The community remains prosperous and politically powerful. But the memory of how quickly the best of times can turn dark has infused the Jewish reactions to events of the past decade. “When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

Back in 2016, many liberals blustered about leaving the country if Donald Trump was elected president; after he won, many Jews actually hatched contingency plans. My mother tried, in vain, to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth. An immigration lawyer I know in Cleveland told me that he had obtained a German passport, and suggested that I call the German embassy in Washington to learn how many other American Jews had done the same.

The German government, for understandable reasons, doesn’t count Jews. But the embassy sent me a tally of passport applications submitted under laws that apply to victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants. In 2017, after Trump’s election, the number of applications nearly doubled from the year before, to 1,685, and then kept growing. In 2022, it was 2,500. These aren’t large numbers in absolute terms; still, it’s extraordinary that so many American Jews, whose applications required documenting that their families once fled Germany, now consider the country a safer haven than the United States.

I also saw signs of flight in Oakland, where at least 30 Jewish families have been approved to transfer their children to neighboring school districts —and I heard similar stories in the surrounding area. Initial data collected by an organization representing Jewish day schools, which have long struggled for enrollment, show a spike in the number of admission inquiries from families contemplating pulling their kids from public school.

After 1967, the previous moment of profound political abandonment, the American Jewish community began to entertain thoughts of its own radical reinvention. A coterie of disillusioned intellectuals, clustered around a handful of small-circulation journals and think tanks, turned sharply rightward, creating the neoconservative movement. Among activists, the energy that had once been directed toward Freedom Rides was plowed into the cause of Soviet Jewry, which became a defining political obsession of many synagogues in the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile, Jewish hippies turned inward, creating new spiritual movements centered on prayer and ritual.

Although not all of these movements proved equally fruitful, this history, in a way, is cause for optimism, an example of how conflict might provide the path to religious renewal and a fresh sense of solidarity. It’s also a reminder that the Golden Age was not an uninterrupted rise.

The case for pessimism, however, is more convincing. The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.

*Lead image source: Top row from left to right : Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty. Middle row from left to right : Robert Mitra / WWD / Penske Media / Getty; Ulf Andersen / Getty; Jean-Régis Roustan / Roger Viollet / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Daily Herald / Mirrorpix / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; David Lefranc / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Frederick M. Brown / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty; Max B. Miller / Archive Photos / Getty. Bottom row from left to right : ABC Photo Archives / Getty; Bachrach / Getty; Getty; Bernard Gotfryd / Getty.

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “The End of the Golden Age.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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    Eight in 10 described Israel as either "essential" or "important" to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they ...