Parents should be just like the free Wi-Fi zones out there that are available to be tapped if one wants access to the Internet. In this case, they should be called Ni-Ti, read as Nay-Tay short for the Tagalog name for Mother and Father. “Nanay” and “Tatay” or “Inay” and “Itay”, similar to Mommy and Daddy, Mom and Dad, or Mama and Papa.
Similar to most Wi-Fi signals, a parent’s presence should always be available and reachable when the children need them most…and not weak or fading on and off.
Parents should have a strong enough signal like maybe four bars at least, if five bars is not possible, so that communication would be easily felt at its acceptable level. Dropped or intermittent calls are simply a pain especially if in the middle of a very important conversation.
You would want to avoid starting to have a weak signal which could mean that your “connection” to your kids isn’t as fast or reliable as it was before. Worst, you might have lost your “connection” entirely with some, if not all of them. If you want to boost the signal of your family network, you could try some of these tips for extending your access range and improving your family network speed and performance.
1. Position in a central location
Make sure you are easily accessible to everyone. Setup your work area in a central location in your home where your kids could easily approach you if they need help with their school work or personal problems. If you stay most of the time at the attic or basement of your home, your kids may not bother to look for you.
I prefer to setup my workplace where I could see all the people coming in and out of the front door. It has its advantages and disadvantages. However, the advantages totally outweighs the disadvantages because I get to see my children’s faces as they enter the living room. You could see right away if they are depressed, angry or overjoyed. It is always a good move if you take time to greet them and ask how their day was. Right there and then they could immediately open up to you.
2. Keep away from technical disturbances
The most common wireless technology, 802.11g (wireless-G), operates at a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (GHz). Many cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors, garage door openers, and other wireless electronics also use this frequency. If you use these wireless devices in your home, your computer might not be able to “hear” your router over the noise coming from them.
Just like some devices that needs to be positioned away from electrical lines, magnetic sources, and other technological disturbances, you should also move yourself away from similar technological disturbances. You may be unconsciously ignoring your child if you are too busy playing browsing websites, watching HD movies on your LED televisions, or playing the newest smash hit of your favorite musical artist.
Examples of these are the computer, television, game console, iPads and other hi-tech gadgets. These multimedia marvels are definitely addicting and will surely interfere with your family network signals. The closer you are to these distractions, the more severe the interference, and the weaker your connection with your kids will be. It is alright to have a hobby, but when you become a parent, you should always devote plenty of time to your kids regardless of any personal enjoyment.
3. Schedule regular service maintenance
Your parental instinct are supposedly designed to be omnidirectional, meaning that you should be “broadcasting” in all directions around the home. If there is seemingly a wall interfering, like an important work project pending, not all of the parental gut feeling are functioning, and much of your effort will just be wasted. It is about time you schedule some “service maintenance” or finding out if your “devices” are still functioning 100%.
Most situations at work doesn’t allow you to have some spare time, but you can try to make better use of the willingness. It only takes extreme discipline and proper time management.
If your work schedule is flexible(some companies have what they call flexi-time where they are just required to have a total of 40 hours of work per week), you may opt to use that eagerness to have some highly anticipated family bonding to interact and spend some quality time with your wife and kids. You can even schedule your day-off during school vacations, or during the time when your kids need you most. Consider going out of town—somewhere new and likeable to your kids. Or just window-shop around the mall during a weekend to at least gain some closeness with your kids. Fro here you would sense if your child feels aloof with your presence, or if they are comfortable to show their affections.
4. Read newly-released instruction manual for latest revisions or product upgrade information
Renew your thinking by upgrading your stock knowledge about parenting. The information that you knew in the past may no longer work in the present time. We may not know that dealing with kids, especially teenagers, is truly tough and different in every case. Some parents would sometime say that they already come with built-in parenting capability and would typically have excellent educational backgrounds to back up that statement. Many would insist that they don’t need to have their stock knowledge upgraded.
Communication signals must be sent both to and from yourself. Sometimes your paternal guidance can broadcast strongly enough to reach your children, but your children can’t send signals back to you. Feedback is important if you would like to know if you are “reaching” them or your advise is simply heard as a sermon that just passes through going from one ear and out to the other ear. To improve this, change your strategy and try out something else. In particular, consider encouraging them to blog, or “friend-ing” them on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter. These add an external, high-gain source of significant data that you can access from your child and their area of influence and reach. It can significantly extend your parental range by learning or getting ideas of their “Likes” and dislikes out from their blog posts, Facebook status and Twitter tweets.
5. Add a “wireless repeater”
Adding a “wireless repeater” or finding ways to boost or extend your communication with your family network range. You may try to give them a mobile phone so they can “text” or call you anytime. Nowadays you could also tweet from your phone, send pictures and video clips, and have them automatically posted on Facebook or other social networks like Tumblr as well. There are several brands and models of phones that are affordable, or if they are choosy, you could subscribe to a postpaid plan that gives you a free phone in the package. It may be a drag to your budget but assuring your communication with your child should never be cheap.
Don’t forget—the security of your family network is as important as its speed and performance. Learn about the different security methods. In other words, keep our family safe and secured by keeping in touch through constant communication. Mobile phones will allow them to immediately contact you in cases of emergencies.
6. Change your wireless channel
Parents can broadcast on several different channels, similar to the way radio stations use different channels. Just as you’ll sometimes hear interference on one radio station while another is perfectly clear, sometimes one wireless channel is clearer than others. What I mean by this is: scolding your child can be done in several ways. One, get really mad, and get physical. Spank or pinch. Curse and yell. Two, use reverse psychology and talk to sarcastically in a soft tone. Three, Ignore them and don’t respond to any of their tantrums, and the list goes on. You have to determine what works with your child but I would not recommend the first one. Delete that from your list. Try changing your scolding channel through your personal configuration page to see if your signal strength improves. I sure wish its possible not to change your personal configuration (It’s extremely difficult but we need to sacrifice if we really love our child). It will surely be easier if we could automatically detect the better channel. But you really have to do some tests before you can find the right channel.
Finding your personal configuration page is not as easy as consulting a quick reference table which can show you the fastest and most effective way. It’s not like one of our favorite gadgets where we could just read the documentation that came with them, or visit their manufacturer’s webpage.
Final Note:
Internet connection from your service providers or ISP network never always reach the highest bandwidth capability. They will always advertise bursting speeds, but in reality it would be capped, the bandwidth shared among other subscribers up to the point of over-subscribing, and never provide you with a real Committed Information Rate (CIR) or an assured fixed bandwidth.
Just the same, no other parent out there can boast that they have the best parenting strategy. Nobody is perfect in controlling or handling disciplinary measures of their children. Many will always suck in something because our time would always be divided among other priorities and interests. Also, children are really somewhat unpredictable, and not even siblings have exactly the same attitude or preference in hobbies, TV series, friends or “barkadas”, etc. Children, especially teenagers, more often express themselves differently. So what works with one, may not jibe with the other. That is why parenting is really very difficult for parents with several children because they would need to be more versatile in how they would communicate with their children. Favoritism would always be existing, but that is not something we should admit to our children. Let’s try our best to show fairness, consideration and balance in how we treat each one of them.
Don’t you wish that parenting is something similar to attending a technical training program where we could get ourselves “certified” or “authorized” to be “qualified” as ideal or perfect parents.
Every respectable parent sincere enough to rear their children well would surely line up to get certified.
