From Home to School Parenting
Parenting foundation of the child rests upon home. The school serves as its extension, which reinforces personality development, and the totality of human development. It is for this reason that home and school parenting became part of the primordia rights of the child as provided for under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
When the child is deprived of school parenting for reasons of economic and others, that child is not only denied of right to education, but the right to total human development.
The first five years of the child, from the point of view of Child's Psychology, is the critical formative years. It is where the physical, motor, cognitive, and emotions start to develop, as illustrated in the following stages:
a) germinal stage - once the implantation of zygote is completed, about two weeks after conception;
b) embryonic stage - till 8 weeks following conception, critical period where embryo is most vulnerable to damage and defect, the first trimester of pregnancy almost all birth defects occur and they become permanent; embryo develops webbed fingers and toes, eyes, ears, mouth, a heart and circulatory system, and a spinal cord;
c) fetal stage - embryo now call fetus, begins after eight weeks;
d) newborn and infancy - totally dependent, but not inert and passive; has built-in reflexes, automatic behavior for survival instinct such as sucking, grasping, crying when hungry or discomfort; can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, and even "converse" rudimentality; this stage extends up to two years;
e)motor development - average of two to four months, starts to turn head in direction of touch, lifts chin when lying on stomach, sits with support, can transfer an object from one hand to another ; at an age of 7-10 months, can sit alone and get into sitting position, can stand with help and can crawl, at 11-12 can stand and walk with support;
f) cognitive development - from 2- 4 months starts to hear sounds, looking, familiarizing faces and things around, as researches show. Understanding, recalling of faces and things around, and even meaningful words following depth perception at one year;
g) emotional development - alongside cognitive, emotional development starts, manifesting imitations of adult facial expression, cries when distressed, smiles and shows interests in slightly unfamiliar objects, may express distress when objects are too familia, fear of visual cliff starts to appear, facial expression of anger prevails in response to frustration especially when not being fed, shows first sign of distress, anxiety, sadness upon loss of attachment figure, like mother.
All these development milestones covering motor, cognitive and emotions laid down the basic foundations of learning when the child reaches five years old, prepared to grasp, acquire, develop, explore aspects of human development. It becomes necessary that a home should, being the basic foundation of child's total development, lays the mantle of invulnerable battleground of learnig.
This is where the school plays significant role as venue for parental extension of the child, as a family.
Hardships, problems met along the educational formative years of the child mostly are attributed to home parenting. However, in some cases these are healed, cured in school parenting , thereby restoring the child's right to human development.
Under the present system of education, there appears to be continuity of formation following the five-year critical formative years at home that requires substantial degree of learning development where the major areas are prepared to fill the vacuum - intellectual/physical and moral/spiritual primarily during the early childhood spanning 6 to 12 years old.
Effective school parenting requires primarily in the building up of a just and sound conscience cognizant of religious morals and beliefs, in conjunction with the basics of education like reading, understanding, mathematical figures and abstraction in feeding the needs of intellectual faculties. It is where the formation of values of the child starts following what is being learned at home.
The very aim of school parenting is not only confined to academic skills of the child. It is in moral and religious upbringing to become of them responsible citizens of our country, sensitive to the needs of other, law-abiding, and God-fearing.
