I have been an educator for more than a decade now. I think it’s safe enough for me to say I have an idea of how it is to become a parent long before I became one. Looking after the welfare of more or less 30 students under my care for a certain period is no easy task! More than the academic concerns, part of my responsibility is to help address my students’ emotions that affect their school performance.

I am thankful for all those years in teaching that prepared me to become a mother, but parenting is an entirely different world. As a mother, I have an instinct to protect my daughter from anything that will potentially cause her harm. However, my years in teaching also taught me that going overboard might result in my child being too dependent and too reliant on me as a parent.

This is what happens when we overparent. According to Cambridge Dictionary, “Overparenting is a parenting style marked by applying developmentally inappropriate levels of control and assistance to children.” While this is usually associated with parenting adolescents and young adults, the approach in itself “entails a high degree of parental control, overprotection, and involvement in every aspect of the child’s life,” and can never be too late or too early.

How do we become involved, but not over involved parents? Here are some notes I took from being a teacher or second mother to a mother so far:

I aim for my daughter to learn to do things on her own as early as she can. My husband and I really want her to be a reader, so we have already established a bedtime storytelling routine we want her to get used to until she can already read stories on her own and won’t need reminding. I aim for routines like this to extend to other parts of her life such as her self-care and hygiene, study habits, cleanliness and organization, personal finances, and so on.

It might be ironic that I’ve been a teacher by profession yet I don’t subscribe to kids being “forced” by their parents to garner medals at a very young age. What do we really want our child to learn? What do we really want her to be? My husband and I talk about this a lot, and we are one in saying that we must make sure our child understands the real reason why she needs to go to school. Otherwise, we will indeed become parents who equate excellence with sky-high grades and recognition at the end of terms or school years.

My husband and I have been working hard to provide for our daughter’s needs for now and in the future. However, we are both firm believers that our daughter doesn’t need to own “the best” and “the latest.” We don’t want her to get the idea that she can get everything she wants in a snap, because this might create a wrong sense of competitiveness instead of appreciation for what is available and given.

I have experienced failures and disappointments in my life that I am sure I don’t want my daughter to go through. Then again, while I want to shield my daughter from the aches and pains of the world, I believe that these failures made me who I am now. To catch all these on her behalf will only make her weak and unable to swim in a sea of problems. I will make sure to be available when she needs help, but I will surely not let my daughter walk on padded floors and walls all her life.

The questions we ask our kids are meant to push them to think for themselves. When we ask a question and get impatient with them for not getting the answer we expect right away, we tend to answer it instead. Hence, the purpose of asking is defeated. Prompting and being patient go hand in hand in making sure that our child processes the questions in their own pace.

I know this sounds like a no-brainer for parents, but I have observed through the years that some children find it difficult to communicate their thoughts and emotions, so their parents tend to speak on their behalf. I will make sure to train her to read the room and communicate her thoughts politely, so she can stand up for herself even without me by her side.

As a new parent, I somehow fear the fact that my child will get bored at home. Most of the time, I feel like needing to open a YouTube tab no matter the volume of work I need to finish, just so she will have something to listen to while she plays. However, when I look at her in her crib, I see that she can definitely play and entertain herself without my help! When she grows a little older, I’m excited to watch her explore her skills and the time she’s given to create meaningful things instead of me spoon-feeding her with activities all the time.