When Parents Step Back, Kids Suffer: What Happens When Parents Aren’t Present in Their Children’s Lives

 

Geediting.com

    Inattentive and absent parenting has been an issue globally for decades. This parenting style can be severally damaging to their children whether it is intentional or unintentionally. This Inattentive and inactive parenting style can lead to behavioral, socialization, and physical issues within their children's everyday lives. 

    The effects of poor parenting can take a large tool on how the child acts behaviorally, which can heavily affect their mental health as well. In a study AAP recorded, “Children in the control group performed significantly better than USN and IA children on cognitive and language testing. In addition, USN and IA children had more symptoms of attention problems, aggression, anxiety, depression, and more internalizing/externalizing behaviors identified on behavioral function tests than controls." USN is used to describe children with prior experience neglect and IA meaning internationally adopted. Both groups had gone through severe events throughout their early childhood and when compared to a control group which is stable, the effects stand out to researchers. Going through your childhood, being deprived of proper attention from your parents, can cause these effects which will alter how a child behaves for life. 

    This style of parenting can also be a key factor that can cause negative social interactions by how they are handled by the child. A study published by MDPI goes further into what parenting types cause this stunt in childhood socialization. The four types of parenting styles are authoritative: warmth and strictness, indulgent: warmth but not strictness, authoritarian: strictness but not warmth, and neglectful: neither warmth nor strictness. MDPI stated, “a Indulgent parenting was related to equal or even better socialization outcomes than authoritative parenting, whereas authoritarian and neglectful styles were associated with the worst socialization outcomes.” Both authoritarian and neglected styles negatively affect socialization skills, which are the ones where the child does not receive warmth from their parents. When a parent isolates a child without attention, it gives them lower self-esteem when socializing, consequently making it harder for them to communicate with others their age. 

    A child's upbring can not only heavily affect the ways they mentally develop but can also affect the physical aspect of their health as well. The results of a study recorded by The National Libary of Medicine states, "negligent parenting was associated with 44% (CI: 1.3-1.7) and 26% (CI: 1.1-1.4) increased likelihood of obesity, respectively, but only among the children not living in poverty. In school-age children, poverty was not a moderator." This could be assumed for many reasons, but the plain reason is due to lack of care on the parents' end. Sometimes parents may get busy during their hectic lives, but when there is no care, that's when the effects will start to show. A key part of keeping our children physically healthy is providing the correct nutrition. If parents don't care about the child's physical health, it can lead to daily fast-food meals which can lead to unhealthy physical status for children. 

    While these facts do still stand and are issues in this generation of children, some may argue that there could be other causes for these issues. A factor that has progressively been put to blame more is the usage of electronics with parents and their younger children. According to Pew Research, "Similarly, 80% of parents with a child age 5 to 11 say their child uses or interacts with a tablet computer, compared with 64% of parents with a child age 3 to 4 who do this and 35% with a child or a child age 2 or younger." Having a child at a young age sitting in front of an electronic device and them becoming addicted to one is very stunting for their cognitive development in many areas. Pew also spoke to parents and they stated, "When asked if they spend too much, too little or not enough time on their phone, more than half of parents overall (56%) say they spend too much time on their smartphone, while about seven-in-ten (68%) say they are at least sometimes distracted by their phone when spending time with their children." Distracted parenting can also be caused by to much electronic usage. Being distracted due to this is a contributor to parents being absent in their children's lives, impacting their development as well. This new addition to raising your children with electronics in society has changed the ways of parenting compared to many years ago. 

 

    It can be easy to fall into the routine of the lazy parent and slowly dissipate from your child's life. If you are to start a family, you must be ready to take the responsibility of giving your child all the care they need because it can very well dictate how they go through life. If you expect your children to take care of and visit you when you're older, you have to take care of them when they're younger.