Carlos Gonzalez
ENC1102
02/04/10
Angie Sanchez
Mercedes Palacio
Nicole Espinosa
Evelin Hernandez
Naivy Borges
The beginning of all
For many people, forming a family is their biggest accomplishment in life. Parenting is part of the cycle of life. Our parents got married, they had us, and throughout our lives they taught us all they knew in hopes that we become better human beings. One day we’ll get married, have kids, and teach them all we know and so on. That’s the cycle of life.
Many centuries ago, in the ancient Sparta, the children were raised different. If the parent would want a good future for their children, they would send them with other families called mentors. Those mentors would teach them everything they needed to become well respected. They would be trained for war and any other things in order to survive. Their motivation as parents to send their children far from them was to give them a better future, a better life. Today, as daughters and sons, some of us may not be sent away depending on many factors such as costumes, beliefs, and the culture of our parents. Life is more liberal now a days than it was centuries ago. This being so, our parents still teach us how to talk, walk, behave, and how to face our mistakes as we grow older by educating us the way they believe is the right way.
Parents are educators and the greatest root of one’s life. Children as witnesses, “…acquired their parents’ vocational skills, learned responsibility, and internalized the values of their society.” (Hansen).Parents are indispensable primary source of knowledge which leads them to succeed in life and motivation plays an important role in this process. They provide the most essential of human needs (physical, mentally, and emotionally). Home, our first school is full of enthusiasm when there is time devoted to children. Having time, parenting requires patience and perseverance for babies and toddlers to eat, walk or crawl. The dinner table, a forum for many motivating exchange of experiences, is an important place of the house where parents have the opportunity to teach their children manners, language skills, and share activities with others. As witnesses, children learn from their wise parents’ moral values and good habits that will help them become contributing members of society. On the other hand, other parents do not have the same devoted time to spend at home; therefore, their moral values and habits are different. There are parents who are busy, tired, and their children become just another appointment to schedule. As witnesses, these children learn in a forced way and interpret other verbal and body language that is related to anger and frustration. Children are good in copying unacceptable behavior. They learn from their parents’ behavior during pressed times, missing steps, and in such a hurry all the time. It’s like birds trying to fly in the company of a strong wind. In this scenario, children learn by self-discovery. The way these parents teach them is different; therefore, these children adopt their same behavior. This is a time in life where the parents’ presence is required. Yet not everything is negative from this view. Children learn to compete and socialize with others when they gather to play games or sports. After this process children grow up and take the good or the bad. Parents influence in this stage of their life is crucial. “High parental control influences the corresponding multiple regulations of human person, filial son, and the true person in the moral sense.” (Hansen). Parents face a transitional time of their children’s life when they turn into teenagers. During this period teenagers learn that its time to apply all the rules and moral values in order to succeed in life without any pain. They will learn the importance of family as a cell of society and will become future parents who will teach future generations what is good and bad from past experience.
When it comes to children, they are the ones that are being represented in our society by their parents. There is a theory called the Bandura’s Theory, which is when parents decide to have a family of their own. In this particular theory there is a way to find out the framework (Rottschaefer) of theories that there are some abilities as a child is growing up, they will see the difference of what goes on around them. Basically they’ll want to have the ability to break a cycle from what they see wrong through their parents. Probably their parents were raised so terrible that they would want to be better when they become parents themselves. Parents should always be the leaders no mater what, because when a child is born, there is no experience in a child’s mind when it first comes into the world. One thing that can happen is that a young child will grow up and actually decide what is right and wrong. Parents should always lead by example, because they were once young and receive experience from their parents and so forth. There are parents who have children who would like to break the cycle because perhaps their parents had a really bad relationship with their own parents when they were growing up.
The way parents should carry their emotions is by actually giving themselves a chance to talk to someone to see what went wrong. This way as children grow up, they won’t be affected by the decisions their parents make. Parents and children go through different emotions and stages in life in which include ups and downs. For example, I remember when I was younger and I was taking karate classes to of course learn how to defend myself in the real world. I did not know when the class was over for me to actually have the ability to put my shoes on, since I didn’t know what shoe goes on my left and what shoe goes on my right. I asked my mom to put them on for me, but she got so emotionally upset with me that she grabbed a pen to write an L on my left shoe and a R on my right shoe. This way, when I put on my shoes I will know which one goes where. After then I never had that problem again and was able to put my shoes on correctly.
My decisions on how I will carry out the legacy of my parents with my kids will be to actually have a better communication with them, like my parents had with me, as I grew up. I speak to them about how I’m doing in school, my goals and how I plan on reaching them and obtaining my Associates in Arts degree. I plan to get married someday and have a child, my plans are to pay for my child’s education and not have him or her worrying about how he or she is going to pay for it. I hope for the best in my child’s life like I’m sure any parent would. I say this because when I was growing up, my mother had a tough time paying for my education specially when it came to college. I was in my freshmen year of high school when my mother started thinking of a plan of payment towards my college education. If she would have started once I was born, I believe that perhaps she would not be paying what she pays now.
This leads us back to inform us that the things we experience in our past can serve to motivate us, or to bring us down self consciously for the future. They say that the way we handle events in our lives is what makes us who we are. Take for example if someone has had a rough life he or she will be motivated to improve their situation. People seek ways to improve their lives. A child with parents who are doing drugs maybe motivated to make sure they don’t end up the same way. Or they may also not have enough drive to change and end up doing the same. If someone has been confronted and put down their entire life there is more likely a chance that they will not have much motivation at all in their lives.
It’s shown how events in our lives, specially traumatic or unfavorable ones can drive us to seek a way to break that pattern and make the best of things for a better life. Living in a poor house can motivate for one to seek money so as to be well of. Parents should try to motivate their children till they are able to do better for themselves. One experience that has motivated me is the fact that no one in my family has gone to college, besides my uncle who got his Associates in Arts degree, which made me want to attend college and get my degree so that I can a well paying job that isn’t a dead end. The fact that most of the people who live in my house smoke cigarette, have motivated me to stay away from them and hate them. When a friend of mine tried to kill himself it motivated me to be strong and do better in life. Those are just some ways in which past experience have given me motivation in life.
Motivation is an aspect of life that we should all have for ourselves in order to do better and make better choices in our future. Due to parenting not everyone is mentally prepared for what comes their way and this is how we make different choices for ourselves and have different things that motivate us. From experience I believe that motivation is the key to ones success in life.
Work cited
Hansen, Hal. "Apprenticeship." Hansen, Hal. Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: in History and Society. Ed. Paula S. Fass. Vol. 1. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004. 64.
Rottschaefer, William A., Lewis & Clark Coll, OR,US. Some philosphical implications of Bandura's social cognitive theory of human agency. US: American Psychological Association, n.d.
"Powers 0f 10", a video which involves time (every two seconds) to go from a meter feet in Chicago, explores the universe using speed from one to 100 million light years, distance from 1 meter (ten to the zero power) to 1,000 million million million meters, and after coming back to the universe, introduces in the skin where explores cells, collagen, nucleus, DNA, electric forces, protons, neutrons, and molecules, among others. It must have been done using powerful scientific machines. In order to introduce it in the skin, the video uses meters, centimeters, millimeters, microns, and angstroms from 10 to the Minos 10 to 10 to the Minos 16.
