Most of us will be­come par­ents some time in our lives. We will then have the awe­some re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of prepar­ing a hu­man be­ing to cope with life both as a child ini­tial­ly and a ma­ture, car­ing, re­spon­si­ble and hap­py in­di­vid­ual.That is the main ob­jec­tive of bring­ing chil­dren in­to the world. Some­times it seems that we for­get this, es­pe­cial­ly when we do not plan our lives and things hap­pen which we should have but did not pre­pare our­selves for. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, par­ent­ing some­times hap­pen to be one of these things, to the detri­ment of our off­springs.

Un­less we are nat­u­ral­ly gift­ed to deal with all the prob­lems that come with par­ent­ing, life can be­come quite a chal­lenge. It's one area of our lives we should re­al­ly pre­pare our­selves for and can eas­i­ly be left to chance. Some of us get lucky and have par­ents or guardians who are gift­ed or who were taught and prac­tised the art of suc­cess­ful par­ent­ing.

But what about those of us who are not prop­er­ly pre­pared? We know the an­swer to this. At best, hope­ful­ly we can recog­nise this and get help. At worst life can be­come in­tol­er­a­ble and bur­den­some to par­ent and child, re­sult­ing in an­oth­er dys­func­tion­al hu­man be­ing on plan­et earth.

But the good part is there is hope for all of us if we take charge of our lives and learn to be­come good par­ents. That's what be­ing ed­u­cat­ed is all about and it's nev­er too late to learn. Re­cent­ly I saw a course be­ing of­fered to se­nior cit­i­zens on par­ent­ing. Ini­tial­ly I smiled. But then I thought, it's a start, some­body is pay­ing at­ten­tion and I'm sure some good will come out of it.Ed­u­ca­tion is the key to many of life's prob­lems when we put in­to prac­tice what we have learnt. So we need to teach and learn prop­er par­ent­ing.

One prac­ti­cal way I would sug­gest do­ing this is to in­tro­duce "par­ent­ing" in­to the sec­ondary school syl­labus and make it an oblig­a­tory course not an op­tion­al one.

Hope­ful