Parental influence is enhanced.

Babies need attention. Talking, playing, carrying and hugging our baby are ways we give our baby the attention required.

With this attention, we bond with our baby. Ours will be the first beautiful voice our baby will be familiar with. Ours will be the first warmth, joy and love in our baby’s life. Blood ties may be strong but nothing can be stronger than love. With this love, our baby will come to care so much for us that he/she would want to please us by imitating and following whatever we teach him/her, be it good or bad. So, teach our baby as much as possible all that is good and his/her future success and happiness await him/her; but directly or indirectly teach him/her through words or example, all which is bad and society and us have a problem on our hands pretty soon.

Examples of imitation of the parent are present everywhere. Look at every human, and most times, you see not only the looks of the parents in them. You can notice the gait, the actions, the ways, the mannerisms and the expressions of the parents. If there is no such resemblance, then there is the possibility that that person was not brought up or cared for from young by his/her parents.

If the bond between children and parents is weak, the influence of the parents cannot be strong. If that be the case, should one day the child learns bad habits or undesirable attitudes and behavior, the parents may find it difficult to overcome such problems. The child may not want to listen.

However, with good bonding between parents and their children, any problem can be overcome and faults corrected immediately.

I can still remember the day my elder son returned from his kindergarten and smilingly uttered a vulgar word he had just learned from another child there. I asked him whether he understood the word. He did not. It was just a new word he had heard that very morning. I explained that that was not a good word to say to anybody. I also told him we do not use such words in our house. I explained further that other people used such words because they do not understand how bad such words are; that such words hurt other people’s feelings. He nodded to my explanation and since then he had not used any vulgar language.

How well we can communicate and correct our children’s faults, and there are bound to be some, depends very much on how well we have bonded with our children. It depends upon the love developed between our precious children and us.