Everyone can be a good parent but not everyone can be the BEST.
There are 2 kinds of parents when it comes to child's mental development:
1. supportive
2. stimulating
A supportive parent is the one that let their children cultivate within themselves their own field of interest. These parents teach their children how to be independent by letting them think on their own thus giving them freedom gradually on decision making. An example of these parents are the ones who chose not to talk to their children in a secondary language but strictly in primary language. This is to let them conceive questions inside their mind using the language that his environment is using primarily. This leads him to a complex questions (with sense) that supportive parent, without any hesitation, answers and explain. Once done satisfying his child's query, supportive parents leave another questions to their children's mind to make them think continuously according to their own will. So guess the key to this development is language and the open mindedness of parents. In the Philippines, its so pleasing for the parents to hear their children talking in English which is a second language but the truth is, they are just helping them to be dumber. Japan and South Korea has large population of bright people that result them to have equal distribution of good technocrats and good civil servants. This style of parenting also induce genius in a child like Einstein’s parents who taught and let him speak German only at childhood same with Jose Rizal who mastered Tagalog and had a brilliant tagalog poem at the age of 8.
On the other side, stimulating parents are the ones who are trying to develop their children's mind according to what they want thus suppressing the children's capability to enhance his real talents and ability. These children often complain about being burned out and stressed resulting to growing disrespect to their parents. This is the problem Philippines have. Aside from having younger population of parents who are fascinated with all that glitters which are obviously not gold, they tend to influence their children to be materialistic but talentless and unintelligent people. They are not taking parenting seriously or maybe they are just not aware of what good parenting is. Take for example how they talk to their children in secondary language and answering their children's questions as quick and as dumb as possible for the sake of just responding to their children's "unimportant" question as what they thought. Hence, they are not helping their children to boost their potentials even though they spend money to send their children in better schools. Supportive parents understand that children's primary education depends on how they guide them intellectually so it doesnt matter if they send their children to public schools. Stimulating parents dont think the same way and will insist to equip their children with academic prestige by sending them to private schools. Amazingly, it only result to same outcome and most of the time, those who are product of supportive parents excel over the children of stimulating parents.
While I try to unlock the mystery of why Philippines is still poor, I find the relevance of this subject matter to our current situation. The uneven distribution of our professionals which are mostly nurses in the past few years is an indication that parents in this country are kind of selfish by being so stimulating to their children disallowing them to follow what their hearts really want. I have this theory that the cause of our low quality government is because our officials are actually programmed to be there and not naturally and not passionately chosen to be at the position. I may not be a child psychologist but this argument of mine that favors nature over nurture will be my guide on raising my own children and may also influence especially the younger parents out there.
