Becoming a parent is a delightful experience, but even happy experiences can be stressful. Parenting involves lot of responsibility as you are trying to shape, nurture and even protect your little one to develop into a healthy and successful individual. In their pursuit, some parents try way too hard and unintentionally end up limiting or even causing damage to their child’s vulnerable sense of self. There is NOTHING CALLED PERFECT PARENTING and you keep learning from your own childhood, how your parents brought you up, and how you are handling your child now. It is a constant learning process and the journey can be made more beneficial for the parents as well as the child by implementing some of the following ways:-
- Spending quality time with your child: Quality time refers to the time spent with your child in some way important. It is time that is set aside for paying full and undivided attention to your child. Spending quality time with your kids is of great importance as it helps in strengthening the bond between you and your kid, understanding your child better and making your child feel important and loved. The behavioral issues your child is showing maybe because he or she wants more of your time.
- Positive reinforcement for promoting good behaviours: Appreciating and encouraging your child’s good behaviour and even acknowledging his/her efforts is of utmost importance in shaping your child’s self-confidence.
- Ignoring negative behaviours to obliterate them: Sometimes, as a parent, you need to overlook the mistakes or bad behaviours shown by your kid to annihilate them. This means, scolding your child upon failure or discouraging him that he is not good enough as he lacks good behaviour can do more harm than good to your child, and in no way can this make them a better person. Sometimes, ignoring a few of their mistakes, failures or bad behaviour can help them in overcoming their drawbacks. Behaviours that are not harmful either to the child or to anybody else can be ignored to an extent.
- Healthy and honest communication between parents and children: The parents should indulge in regular conversation with their children as it helps the parents as well as the children to understand each other’s points. It can be of great benefits if the parents first calmly listen to their children first before telling them anything to do.
- Shared responsibilities at home: Shared responsibilities at home and making your child accountable for looking after certain tasks at home; be it keeping his/her room clean or watering the plants daily, etc. ensures the child develops into a responsible being. It should always be kept in mind that children are very keen observers and they learn a lot from what happens around them. Thus, parents need to be careful with what they say, how they say and how they behave especially in front of the child. If you expect your child not to spend too much time playing games on the mobile or tablet, you need to do the same first!
Ensuring a functional and healthy relationship between you and your child is the best way to boost the sense of commitment, consideration, communication, and cooperation. Also, a healthy connection between you and your child can help in reducing conflicts and stress while encouraging the young minds to make healthy choices in life and set strong individual values.
A healthy Parent-Child relationship goes a long way in ensuring that we live in a peaceful and harmonious society that values fellow living beings, is in sync with nature, and gifts a better environment to its future generations than what it inherited from the previous one!
