LOVE AND DISCIPLINE – INSEPARABLE DUO IN PARENTING (Part 2)

My Own Upbringing

I consider it a great personal misfortune to lose my father on the eve of my first birthday. I was told by my mother and uncles that my father, a USAFEE soldier, was killed in a military encounter with the Japanese forces a couple of years before the end of World War II in 1945. 

“Being a single parent, my mother was forced to work on 2 jobs to put food on the table for me and her orphaned nephew and nieces.” This would greatly affect my childhood and my future life.

Without a father and with a mother whom I seldom see because of her work, I was left literally on my own.  The lack of the basic material things in life was made worse by the lack of parental guidance and discipline on my part.

Under these circumstances, while I became independent at an early age while trying to solve my own problems, I made many blunders that would affect my later life because of the frailties of a young mind and the absence of guidance and discipline.  

LOVE AND DISCIPLINE – INSEPARABLE DUO IN PARENTING (Part 1)

Unconditional Love

Every mother and father will unequivocally agree that the most important thing parents can give their children is love. However an essential matter should be appropriately considered. Does this mean unconditional love? That is, just giving everything a child wants without any restraint or set of parameters to learn and follow?

Oftentimes, parents ask themselves this question. Do we need to discipline the children whom we dearly love? For most if not all of us, children are precious gifts from God. When a child is born to a family, this “bundle of joy” becomes the focus of total attention of both the parents and the entire family. 

More importantly however, parents have to realize and assume a new extremely critical role, an immense responsibility to bring up their child as a respectable and responsible individual. We have learned how many fathers and mothers have accepted with remorse their failure as good parents because of the unconditional love sans appropriate discipline they gave to their children.