Positive parenting techniques aim to foster healthy relationships between parents and their children that are built on mutual respect, as well as discipline strategies that are more constructive than punitive, such as redirecting bad behavior or providing alternatives.
To foster positive behaviors in your child, it is vital that their belonging and significance buckets remain full.
1. Teach Healthy Emotional Regulation
Many children struggle to regulate their emotions, leading them to act out with tantrums or aggression. Instead of punishing these behaviors with punishments like spankings and spanks, positive parenting experts recommend teaching children healthy emotional regulation techniques.
Simply encouraging your children to discuss their emotions can go a long way toward alleviating feelings. Validate both negative and positive emotions as normal, as well as teaching them coping mechanisms such as deep breathing or counting to 10 that they can use when upset occurs.
Help your kids develop an expansive emotional vocabulary by reading books about various feelings, providing materials such as stickers or drawings depicting such emotions, and offering advice and counselling when necessary. This will give them insight into why they’re feeling certain things – which in turn helps regulate their emotions more effectively.
Children learn a great deal by watching their parents, so modeling healthy emotional regulation is vital to their development. This could involve verbalizing feelings and how you cope with them, or showing your kids techniques you use such as deep breathing or listening to music – or helping your children find individual coping strategies for dealing with tough situations like a friend taking away their favorite toy.
2. Teach Positive Coping Skills
Positive parenting techniques teach children one of the most crucial life skills: healthy coping strategies. Children will learn how to regulate their emotions and identify what causes distress so they can seek assistance as needed.
Kids who learn effective coping mechanisms will become more resilient in the face of challenges, knowing when assistance may be required and solving problems without negative repercussions.
As a parent, you can work alongside your child to model healthy behavior that encourages them to develop these techniques by modeling healthy behavior. For instance, encourage them to talk openly with you about their feelings; teach calming breathing and muscle relaxation exercises (e.g. taking five deep breaths or stretching) throughout the day; it is key that these become part of daily practice in order to be useful when faced with stressful situations. It is crucial that these skills become habitually used before they can become necessary during an acute situation.
Assure your child it is normal to feel sad or scared from time to time; some kids think they must always feel happy all of the time, which can be very harmful. Teach them it’s okay for emotions like sadness or fear to arise as long as these negative states don’t last too long before moving on.
3. Let Your Kids Make Mistakes
Children need the chance to make mistakes and learn from them, as this allows them to grow emotionally, socially and cognitively as well as experiencing hard work and perseverance firsthand. Although it can be challenging for parents to allow children the freedom to experience frustration or setbacks without getting frustrated themselves, it is vitally important that children understand mistakes are inevitable and failure should not be seen as something unforgivable.
Instead of emphasizing their negative behavior, try talking to them about how they’re feeling and trying to interpret their feelings (which may be like reading hieroglyphics) so as to understand why they were acting out or misbehaving in some way. Sometimes there may be something deeper at play behind these symptoms – for instance feeling overwhelmed with chores and schoolwork may contribute.
Be a role model for them by showing how you handle mistakes and setbacks yourself – they will know that there will always be someone there to assist them when things don’t go according to plan.
4. Be Their Biggest Cheerleader
One key to raising happy kids lies in showing them your unconditional love and support, helping them feel safe and secure – an essential element in emotional development.
Show your affection and support by giving positive feedback, praise and encouragement. Try not to criticise them too harshly as this could damage their self-esteem; rather provide honest feedback that can help improve their behavior and avoid using words such as “You’re so stupid!” which only serve to make them defensive and may damage relationships between both of you.
As part of your goal to be your children’s most supportive cheerleaders, give your full attention whenever they speak with you – this is especially important if they are upset or struggling in some way; by truly listening, you can better understand their needs and provide support that can get them through difficult periods in their life.
Parenting can be both rewarding and trying. Raising happy kids means setting appropriate boundaries, teaching healthy coping skills, letting mistakes happen freely and being their biggest cheerleader. Just don’t forget yourself in all this: finding ways to take a little time off may help ensure that everyone benefits in the end!