Parenting a child is influenced by many factors:
- Parent's personality and attitudes
- Child's temperament and development stage
- Parenting style, which refers to combination of strategies that a parent uses to raise their children.
- External factors like- type of family, social and cultural influences, economic status, education of parents, resources available for parents and children and many more.
Thus, all these factors are to be kept in mind to raise a child in a better way. There is no right/wrong, good/bad parenting. The strategies which are effective for one parent-child combination may not be applicable for other parent-child combination. so no two parents can have exact matching parenting style.
Both the parents when act as TEAM and collaborate with each other to raise their children, that results in successful parenting. Accept that we are different in our perceptions and personalities and rather than creating conflicts, use these differences for our advantage and make the parenting effective.
Some of the tips or effective parenting in general are:
- Do not harm or add fuel to fire: Children are in learning stage and tend to make errors in the process. so lets walk along with them, rather than leading them from front. while developing, they have their own doubts/worries, lets not add to that,but motivate them in every way possible to face their challenges.
- Manage your own stress: We, parents are also individuals with our own hassles of life.let our stress not cause pressure to our children. Lets manage our stress by connecting with others, sharing responsibilities, developing healthy life styles,using various other relaxation techniques.
- Do light exercises together: Every one requires daily dose of exercise. lets make some part of it as shared activity with our children and bring togetherness in the family.
- GOOD NEWS: Lets keep bed time story activity as last task for the day to the child. Thus the child will relax from day to day hassles and hurries. With older children, sharing a pleasant incident or moment of the day or having dessert together or silly pranks will help. the important caution is these activities should not be done by electronic devices, they need to have personal touch to build interpersonal relations between parents and children.
- Share a memory: Share a memory from your past, with help of old photos, whenever possible. This builds connection between us and children. they will feel involved in our lives.
- Creative together: Lets be creative together. do new or novel activity together in leisure time.
- Parallel play and private play: Sometimes, children and ourselves require privacy and lone time. so lets allow them to play privately on their own for sometime. along with this parallel play also is required, like the children will play on their own near us. in parallel play they are with us in same room, but we will be doing our work or pastime and they will be engaged in their activity or play. this builds trust and confidence between us.
- Follow structured routine: Having a structured routine for few tasks keeps the day organised and free for new activities. Routine should not be rigid daily regime,but few repeated tasks like wake up time, bathing, eating, sleeping time etc can be time specific. this creates a rhythm in our life, bringing us near our biological clock or nature.
- Physical contact: Lets show physical love and care, as much as possible. gentle touch and hugs will help in developing self acceptance and love in children.
- Monitor the child: Lets observe children regularly for anxiety and worry. The behavioral disturbances like stubbornness, anger and aggressiveness may be caused because of unexpressed or unidentified stress or anxiety. lets give helping hand and opportunities for them to open up and ventilate their worries.
Hopefully by following the above said tips and techniques, our parenting becomes "happy parenting".
