Like the generations before, parenting today is still a challenge.
Behavior
Parenting is Not Easy
Like the generations before, parenting today is still a challenge.
What we have in common with the past generations is a desire to make sure our children are happy and healthy and grow into confident adults. From the day of announcing the upcoming birth, parents find their lives filled with excitement, anticipation, and worry about how they will manage this new life. Once the child arrives, parents instantly become teachers, providers, caretakers, and mentors.
- How do you know you’re doing it right?
- What happens when your approach doesn’t yield the desired results?
- What are the traits and values of good parenting?
Some believe good parenting involves empathy, self-esteem, honesty, and self-control. None of which is easy. Most parents agree it takes more energy and patience to sit down with a 6-year-old having a bad day than it does to solve the world’s problems.
Since children learn by observing the world around them, parent behaviors set the example and standard for a child’s actions, interests, and notions of how they approach life. Here are some parenting tips, principles, and guidelines that can help make the journey more comfortable and stressful but certainly not less eventful.
Education resources
Bonding and Building Trusted Relationships
Nature has created an instinctive bonding that magically occurs between a parent and child. Parents realize they are responsible for their child’s physical, mental, and emotional health and welfare. Here’s where bonding can be a parent’s greatest gift by assuring the child’s sense of security and self-esteem.
In the beginning, when the child needs something only a parent can provide, a vocal alert that no one can ignore is sent – nature at its best. Children tend to suffer in silence as they mature, creating another dimension of worry for parents. Parents learn the signs and symptoms signaling a child’s wants and desires as a result of bonding. At the same time, bonding helps a child develop. Kids learn to read their moods and guess responses as a protective defense function.
- Secure bonding instigates a feeling of protection and happiness with an eagerness to learn.
- Insecure bonding leads to uneasiness, lack of confidence, or learning difficulties.
Open Communication
Communication may be one of the best parenting tools for coping with all the changes that lay ahead. Children grow up so quickly, and for a parent, it’s tough to keep up with all the questions and curiosities that exist from infancy and adolescence into young adult stages. Although every child may experience similar events or life situations, no two kids are identical, and the solution that worked for one doesn’t always work for the next.
It starts with listening. Children will always have a question. The worst thing a parent can do is ignore it. Questions from younger children are straightforward. As a child grows, the questions get more complicated and sometimes embarrassing for an adult. Do your best to answer the question honestly to prevent miscommunications or misconceptions.
- Keep a calm tone, take a deep breath, and listen to the good and bad – they’re telling you something you need to know.
- Explain the do and don’t and what-ifs.
- Make time for talking with your kids – it’s essential to understand their views and why they asked the question.
- Good parents often communicate with their kids.
- Parents want to be the person they come to for help.
Start communications early to shape a child’s individuality, behaviors, and habits. It helps a child understand different rules for different situations.
Be the Model
As a parent, you have an image of your child. As a child, they rely on the most influential person in their life – you. Set a good example. Instill good manners, respective of others, and teach them how to feel good about themselves. Because children mimic, their thoughts will shift to hear your voice when in doubt.
- Participate in their life
- Practice what you preach.
- Share special moments.
- Ask for their opinion.
- Let them know it’s okay not to know everything – you don’t.
When you’re exhausted from work, school, home, and life – reward yourself for being a good parent. Acknowledge that your child is happy, healthy, and growing into the person you want to be.
