Top 3 Tips for Parenthood
Patience is the most important factor in how we teach, encourage, and communicate with our children
The journey of parenting consists of endless mixtures of emotions. The excitement about all the things you want to do with your newborn is tempered by the profound fear of doing one of those things wrong.
Are we supposed to feed our newborns this way?
How are we supposed to communicate with our kids?
What is the best way to teach life’s most difficult lessons?
There’s rarely a clear-cut answer, but there are a few tips that can help with your approach:
Patience
This is the most important factor that contributes to the way we teach, encourage, and communicate with our children. If your kid threw a soup bowl on the floor you might be liable to fly off the handle. But there are always at least two options:
- Freak out and yell at your child, shaming them for what they’ve done wrong.
- Take a deep breath and say, “What you did wasn’t nice. You created a mess on the floor and it requires a huge effort to clean up. Because of this, we won’t be able to have dinner together. Maybe next time you can rethink that move.”
It’s not easy and, more often than not, kids know how to push our buttons. The question comes down to how we can make this a teachable moment, instead of repeating the volatile reactions we’ve all experienced as children ourselves.
Be Firm
We’ve all seen kids screaming and throwing tantrums in shopping malls, supermarkets, and toy stores. The challenge is to be firm and disciplined with your child in a public setting. Assess the severity of the situation. If you need to leave, do so. But don’t miss out on teaching the lesson. We have a responsibility to illustrate right from wrong.
Figure out the best way to broadcast the message and then stick to your guns.
Be Balanced
Strike a balance between patience and discipline because basic character development is built from scratch. It bears repeating that our children are products of their home and social environment and all of the experiences therein.
Treat your young ones with loads of love while maintaining the most productive disciplinary measures in a patient and composed manner.
