For my research essay, I will be discussing the idea of a child’s upbringing and how it affects their adult lives. Moreover, I will be examining how having a challenging childhood can make an individual a more well rounded person. By looking through several psychological articles, I want to be able to gain some professional opinions on this issue to support my claim. Most of my current claims are based off of personal experiences, therefore I need professional opinions in order to prove my points.

Parents want to give their children everything they never had, but this can be more detrimental to their child then they may think. Some parents may try to protect their children from the pains life can bring, but by doing so they are holding their children back from learning how to deal with them properly. Sheltering one’s child can create issues that are much harder to fix once that child is in adulthood as well as arise issues within the rest of the family. There is no such thing as a perfect upbringing, but through research and looking into other individual’s experiences, there may be a path to a better one.

1.) Childhood Stress and Resilience

URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-7711-3_5

• Background: They talk about the effects of chronic stress on children and what inside and outside forces are influencing it. They identify what could be causing these stress triggers and define a specific way of aiding this through practice.They also introduce an idea called preventive interventions that are meant to help create resilient children. Overall it focuses on the impact of biological, psychological, and social well-being on children. 

• How I Intend to Use It: What really catches my eye about this topic is the use of the word “resilience” throughout the abstract because that is something I want to focus on in my writing. They also introduce new topics such as “Adverse childhood experiences” and “preventive interventions” that I would like to learn about and include in my writing. 

2.) Raising Well-Balanced Kids

URL: https://www.challengesuccess.org/parents/parenting-tips/

• Background: this article discusses helpful tips in order to create well balanced children. They give several tips as well as including a brief description of what exactly these actions will achieve in raising one’s child in this manner. They talk about different ways of thinking about the protection of one’s child, and what may be considered too much. 

• How I Intend to Use It: I would want to use the overall ideas presented in this article. They bring up some interesting points and most of some valid reasoning behind it. I like their reasoning in allowing children to make their own mistakes as well as giving them the necessary space to do so. I also like the one section that discussed giving children responsibilities and the benefits that come with it. 

3.) Resilience in Children: Strategies to Strengthen Your Kids

URL: https://www.psycom.net/build-resilience-children

• Background: This article is from a psychological web page, that includes several other psychological topics including the effects of teen smoking trends and helping teens cope with rejection. The article stresses the idea of children working to fix their own issues independently. It gives several suggestions on building the mental well-being and trust of a child in order for them to become strong enough to fend for themselves. 

• How I Intend to Use It: I want to focus on all of the strategies they present. They encourage actions such as “Building a Strong Emotional Connection” and “Promote Healthy Risk-Taking” to name a few. A lot of their viewpoints match up with the issues I would like to further discuss in my paper. Allowing children to do things on their own from the beginning will help them a great deal in the end.

4.) How to raise successful kids without overparenting.

URL: https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-raise-successful-kids-without-overparenting/

• Background: This article right away identifies the idea of over parenting, and shows an understanding of the difficulty of finding a “happy medium” between oppressive and devoid parenting. They discuss how small things done in a specific way could potentially alter how one’s kid goes about life. One specific talk called “Don’t worry about raising happy kids” could bring about many disapprovement in the eyes of parents watching it. 

• How I Intend to Use It: I want to focus on the reasoning they give for the many arguments they address. Each argument comes from different excerpts from particular TED talkers. I could go into some of the speakers full presentations and many broaden my ideas more by doing so. Some of the topics many parents may strongly disagree with, but make very valid points.

5.) Too-Perfect Parents Are Landing Kids in Therapy.

URL:https://www.newser.com/story/121085/lori-gottlieb-caring-too-much-can-land-kids-in-therapy.html

• Background: In the Newser article, the writer starts off with an eye catching title. Too-Perfect Parents Are Landing Kids in Therapy. The article is based around an experiment a psychologist created using her own willing clients. What she discovered changed her own way of thinking about raising her children and created more and more questions that she wanted answered. 

• How I Intend to Use It: I would want to use this source as one of my main citations in my writing. It proves that a perfect upbringing can cause more harm in a child’s future than many would expect. It expresses many ideas that come to mind when raising children and shows that many small things play a huge part of the psychological development of a child. It also includes a link to the psychologist’s original study that I could use if needed.