Roles and Responsibilities of Parents or Guardians in Family Life

Parents are the main members in a family. They control most of the activities of families. Parents play very important roles to lead the family towards the path of success. A successful or unsuccessful family depends upon the role of parents, their capacity, and experience to guide the family. Parents have many responsibilities towards their family members. For example , to provide them nutritious food, health care, education, proper training , teaching  them social and religious norms and values, make them able to adjust themselves as a respectable members of the community.

Responsibilities of Parents towards Their Children

Responsibilities are the duties to deal with or take care of something or somebody . As parent are the leaders and policy makers of family ,  their responsibility is to take care of their children and make them bona fide citizens of the nation. We can discuss the following points as the responsibilities of parents:

a) Management of income 

It is the duty of parents to fulfil economic need of their family members. Children need different kinds of commodities and services. Their source of fulfillment of such needs is parents. First, they expect the fulfillment of their needs from their parents. 

b) Provision of education

Education is the basic need of life. It is regarded as one of the fundamental human rights too. Education develops one's capacity to generate income. Family members should be provided with quality education. Parents should provide proper education to them.

c) Fulfilment of the needs of children

Basic needs are associated with survival process. Everybody must get proper food, clothes, housing, health care, etc. to live a healthy life. It is the parents who provide solutions to these needs to their children.

d) Plan the family size

A big family always has problems related to all sectors in life. The supply of food, housing , clothing and other essential needs becomes difficult in big families. A small family can easily maintain these things. So, parents should determine the size of their family according to their capacity and income generating power. 

e) Birth spacing

For proper health care of mother and child, there must be certain gap between two consecutive births. It is suggested that there must be at least four to five years gap between first and second child. If the birth spacing is not proper , both the mother and child will be affected badly. Therefore, it is the duty of parents to maintain proper birth spacing and improve the health of their children.

f) Socialization

Socialization is the process of teaching and learning social norms, values and traditions. Human being is a social animal. Each individual learns this process from their parents first  in their life. It is the parent's duty to guide children in socialization process.