I recently got into a rather heated discussion with a friend about parenting philosophies and raising children.  Now you may wonder what the heck this has got to do with starting an internet home business, but if you’ll bear with me and read through this article to the end, I’ll get to it.

As a mother to one child, I’m pretty much a textbook Mum.  I have read quite a number of books on parenting and I judge the authors of my books by the level of their experiences and the quality and quantity of scientific evidence they have backing their information.  I am new to the role of parenting and I confess that I knew nothing about being a mother prior to the arrival of my son.  Since the day I discovered I was pregnant, I have learned a lot about being a mother through my own personal experiences and from the books that I have read.  Using a combination of what I’ve read tailored to my own experiences with my son coupled the new maternal instincts I’ve recently developed, I feel fairly comfortable with the road to parenting I have chosen.

When I recently commented to a friend about my choice to discipline my son without smacking, she seemed rather skeptical that such a method of parenting could be successful.  I told her that I wanted my child to behave out of his respect for me and his desire to please me, not because he feared the punishment that would be coming if he misbehaved.  Fear of punishment does not promote good behaviour when I am not around.  It just leads a child to develop more creative ways not to get caught.  She disagreed and felt that fear of punishment was the very thing that promoted good behaviour.  She was also convinced that smacking was necessary if you wanted to communicate an important lesson to your child such as not running out onto the road.

Obviously, with my son barely past his first birthday, I have yet to implement such methods of discipline and observe how well they worked for me so I could not use my own experiences to back up my reasons for following such parenting principles.  I believed in the methods of discipline I had read from Dr Sears because, not only was he a paediatrician who had eight children of his own (some of whom are now paediatricians with their own children), but he also had the benefit of scientific studies and the wealth of experiences from all his patients in the many years that he had practiced.  His books are the sum of what he has learned over the span of his practicing life, therefore I had good reason to trust the information I read from them.

My friend’s parenting philosophy was based on her own study of two which included her friend and her sister.  Her friend had been raised by parents who were paediatricians who followed the textbook to the letter and yet her friend was an emotional wreck and “totally screwed up”, while her friend’s sister had been raised by parental instincts (completely disregarding what had been written in the books) turned out to be perfectly normal and healthy.  Then she cited her own experience of having been smacked as a child compared to her sister who had not been smacked, whom she felt was now completely wreckless and concluded that smacking was necessary.

I thought to myself, who would I listen to?  My friend (though well-intentioned) who was not even a mother and had based her parenting philosophy on her own family experiences and that of her friend’s, or what had been written by Dr Sears - a paediatrician and father to eight children with a wealth of experiences he has collected and documented from parents visiting his practice?  I think the answer is quite clear.

When you’re starting your own business, you are going to come up against a lot of similarly well-meaning friends who will offer their “two cents” worth of advice.  Before you allow such advices to affect your decision making, it is important to be aware that many of these friends will poor cold water over your business ideas even when they themselves have little to no business experience.  One such business that is often under attack by people who don’t know much about it is network marketing. 

They will tell you all the things that is wrong about network marketing that they have heard or that they believe to be true when in reality they are the last people you should be listening to because they are like my friend and her parenting philosophy.  A lot of what they say will be based on heresay and what limited experiences they have encountered.  And yet, if you look at the network marketing industry, there are many people who are successfully running a network marketing business and earning a healthy income from it.

If starting your own internet home business is something you truly desire to do, then make sure you talk to the right people who really know what they’re talking about and don’t allow your plans to be dragged down by friends and family (no matter how well-intentioned they may be).