In the process of his or her personal development, a human being meets a lot of educators. The first educators are the parents. The family has the greatest influence on a person’s life and parents face an immense responsibility.

A lot of parents think that satisfying the material

and physiological needs of the children is all there

is to parental duties.

•respect their limitations and difficulties,•refrain from constantly telling them what they are doing wrong,•refrain from constantly telling them what they should do,•be clear and consequent about their rules,•let them deal with the consequences of what they do,•show them how the world works.

These efforts, however, are not the end of parental responsibilities.

Children need their guardians to:

•listen to what children say,•speak in a way that children understand,•notice and acknowledge their achievements and talents,•respect their feelings and needs,•support their search for different solutions,•help them go through difficult times,•spend time with them and give them attention,

•It is necessary to make parents and educators realise that the person who educates has a significant responsibility for the success of the education; in other words, to change a child we often need to start from changing ourselves.

•It’s impossible to raise a child without a clear, comprehensible system of values, which the guardians/teachers both believe in and use in life themselves.

A young person who:feels a strong emotional connection with parents,is confident about his/her own self-worth, abilities and identity,has social skills,is able to say no to activities that might be threatening to him or her,becomes less likely to participate in the risky activities.

Ages between 10 and 18 are times of many important development changes. It is a period particularly prone to

disturbance and risky behaviours, the most common of which are:

smoking, drinking alcohol, use of other substances, early sexual initiation and experimentations with sex, aggressive behaviour, self-aggression, criminal activity.

The neccessary aspects of educator’s work: support the child and be demanding to help the child gain and develop the above-mentioned skills and abilities.

It isn’t true that there are children you can’t praise for anything,There is something good about each and every person – you

just need to want to see it.We can all learn to notice the good in every human being.

When a child experiences the respect and trust of adults, gets a chance to make a choice and solve the problem him or herself, the child gains trust and selfrespect, the faith in his/her own abilities and the sense of his/her own limitations. The child gains courage to deal with even more difficult tasks. The adult develops an even bigger trust and respect towards the child.

Thanks to the educator’s support, the child builds up a sense of control and of his or her own value.

Instead of forcing the children to do something, it’s worth to try cooperation, leave them a choice, make the rules clear and be consistent about keeping them.

•As educators, we most often focus on the behaviours we don’t like. •To discipline the child we use a raised voice, comparisons with other children, threats, punishments and bans. These aren’t very successful and usually result in increased resistance, making it really difficult to build up positive personal relations.

Parental competence should constantly be in the process of development and improvement, seeing as social life is changing all the time, roles change (for example the woman is at work, the man stays at home).

A study of parental competence was conducted in Poland in 2010.

The study focused on:

•Parents’ attitudes and their reactions to children’s behaviours in everyday life situations.•Assessment of parents’ knowledge in the area of delopmental psychology, the typical skills of children at different stages of their delopment.

The study shows that the parents’ competence is on a relatively low level.

insufficient 17% low 41%

sufficient 34%

good 6%

very good 2%

Grading of the parents’ knowledge

The parents want to be „good parents”,

And the low results are not due to their conscious doings, but rather because of the lack of necessary competence. The parents are lost in the current world, busy with professional lives and lacking the possibility of exchanging experience in raising children, which used to be provided by multigenerational homes, something that doesn’t happen very often nowadays. They don’t have the ideas, tools nor knowledge about how to deal with children. How to build up a positive relation with children, basing it on mutual respect, understanding and communication, on a clear system of values. How to deal with difficult situations.

The children have a right to have responsible parents

And a responsible parent is one that can admit to making mistakes and to lacking knowledge, one that tries to fix the mistakes and searches for the answers when in doubt, one that isn’t afraid of changes even if the changes need to start from him- or herself.

What should a good instructor be like?The following factors influence the current level of

competence:

Instructor’s competenceexperience, knowledge,the ability to recognise personal traits and use them in predicting people’s behaviours, positive influence on others (rational persuasion, consultation and inspiration)

Psychological factors:active energy, the will to make effort, to work with others,acceptance of others, being able to make the right conclusions and find solutions,

A good instructor is confident and able to control his or her emotions. Not being able to control oneself leads to problems with controling the group and gaining the group’s trust. The instructor cannot present him or herself as omniscient, the instructor’s work cannot make the students feel inferior. His/her task is to inspire and motivate to self-development. The final result of the workshop depends on whether the instructor is able to create a positive atmosphere.