Parenting is a journey full of excitement, unprecedented growth and developments as well as uncountable challenges. This blog post will highlight some key practices that if embodied will lead to a smoother parenting experience. Remember, children need to experince a loving, nurturing environment in order to thrive. Embodying these practices will help your children trust you more and be willing to cooperate positively in the family as they grow and mature through adolescence into adulthood.
Below are 9 things that make a positive difference as children grow and mature.
1. Prioritising Parent-Child Emotional Connection
Emotional connection is a strong affection, closeness and attachment parents and their children feel towards someone each other. It is key in developing a strong parent-child bond because it is the bedrock of trust. Throughout the growth of your children from infancy to adulthood, prioritise spending lots of quality of time with them. This can be achieved in a myriad of ways from bedtime stories, actively listening to them, engaging in family activities, helping with homework, spiritual growth practices, doing chores together etc.
The crux is plan non-negotiable parent-child time and honour it. The regular these bonding sessions are, the faster, authentic and deeper the emotional bond grows. These repetitive small moments become the building blocks for quality one on one time especially in teenagehood. The investment in building trust helps your children open to you freely about their emotional needs, hopes and aspirations years down the line.
2. Modelling Good Communication Skills
We all know that communication is the glue that holds relationships. It is therefore imperative that we equip our children with good communication skills. The best way to do this is through modeling. Good communication skills will help them not only express themselves succinctly but also to stand up for themselves, create boundaries or walk away from disrespectful interactions or relationships.
Respectful communication involves interacting with others and addressing relational or work-related issue in a manner that that makes both parties feel heard and that their opinions matter. It also involves refraining from personal attacks, humiliating others, severe cricism and other relationship breaking tactics.
Children learn respectful communication, by obseving how you handle conflicts between you and your spouse, friends and the people you interact with. From a young age, work on being empathetic, self-aware and emotionally intelligent. This helps you to be the person your child can look upto as a role model.
3. Fostering Independence
Encouraging and supporting a child’s independence is critical in helping her develop a strong sense of self. Teaching and delegating age-appropriate responsibilities is the simplest way to achieve this. Throughout this independence nurturing period, allow your child enough learner’s, contributor’s and challengers safety.
This gives them not only self-confidence but also self-trust. When cultivating independence in decision making give them a memorable framework to use. An example would be impressing integrity, a reference to family and self directed values, aligning decisions with long-term goals as well as analysis of consequences before acting. By doing this, you continuously prepare them for bigger, more responsible decisions as they mature into adulthood.
4. Practicing Consistent Structure
Structure for a family with young and growing children is indespensable because it brings about stability and cohesion. A home with a consistent structure provides a physical, emotional and mental safety that children and all family members need. The foundation of a solid structure is repetition of specific activities at specific times. This helps reinforce discipline and family cohesion.
Bedtime, wake up, mealtimes, devotion time, chores, study family time and time with friends are some of the building blocks of structure in a home. A home with volatile and unpredictable structure takes a toll on the emotional and mental wellbeing of growing children. It is therefore important for you as a parent to create a sustainable routine at home.
5. Practicing Consistent Boundaries
Boundaries are key in reinforcing required values, habits and achieving desired developmental goals. Boundaries define what is acceptable, what is not and the consequences thereof. To effectively fucntion in a family, social group or friendships both children and adults need boundaries.
For growing children, having clear boundaries help them acquire positive habits such as integrity, self-awareness, self-discipline and self-leadership with ease. Having no boundaries invites constant cases of chaos within a family, indiscipline, behavioural issues as well as poor self esteem in the child as he cannot comprehend why almost everything he does is wrong.
Boundaries are not monolithic and each family has its own unique boundaries that align with its unique family values, goals and children’s developmental stage.
6. Balancing Independence and Oversight
As children grow, their quest for independence increases. Although this is a healthy and normal developmental phase, parents are caught unaware. Being ignorant of a child’s developmental stage might lead the parents to pathologise their child’s natural growth phase as defiance, indiscipline or disobedience. Being educated and informed about developmental milestones helps parents to be understanding, surportitive while maintaining firm yet loving boundaries.
Something all parents with growing children battle with is finding the right balance between giving their children space for exploration while ensuring their safety. The need to hang out with friends, pushing curfews, going shopping alone, attending friends parties uncheparoned, passwords on phones staying late at night etc. are some of the areas teenagers assert independence. It is your duty as a parent to decide limits, what is acceptable, what is not and the consequences. Equally important is guidance and counselling at all times.
7. Managing Generational Parenting Challenges
Each generation has it’s own parenting challenge. Parents of today are battling the digital world. This includes social media, gaming, television and easy access to the internet. Like each generational challenge, parents need to continually keep abreast with trends in their growing children.
Most of these challenges encompass things that are outside the control of parents. As an example, you may delay digital acess to your child but he may have ease access through a friend’s phone or in a cyber cafe. As if not enough, holiday assignments are mostly sent digitally making access to the internet inevitable.
It is therefore imperative for you to remain open-minded and ever ready to handle these challenging times with firmness, finnese and tact. Amid these times, strive to maintain a close parent-child bond while addressing and amicably solving emerging issues.
8. Navigating Emotional Ups and Downs
Children experience intense and unpredictable emotions as they grow and develop. The zenith of emotional rollercoaster happens in teenagehood. This is fuelled by a surge in hormones. Being an emotionally aware parent helps in regulating your child and importantly, equipping him with skills to sepf-regulate. The emotional management becomes easier if you prioritise emotional regulation as well as respectful communication from early childhood.
Apart from raging hormones, teenagers face alot of emotional battles in managing the expectations they have of themselves, how they compare to their peers as well as how well they meet parental expectations. This coupled with a proclivity to impulsive decision making makes it the most challenging growth phase in a child. Your unwavering empathy, nurturing and firm yet loving support is crucial in helping your child navigate the emotional ups and downs.
9. Preparing Them for Adulthood and letting them go
Parenting is life long endeavour. It does not stop when children start showing signs of independence. Teenagers and adult children still need parents. A part of parenting that is not given enough highlight is preparing children for adulthood. The education given in schools and other organisations is paltry when it comes to living a repsonsible life independently.
This post has covered some of the skills parents need to inculcate in their children to help them ease into adulhood. In as much as real life is always the best teacher, parental guidance, counselling, protection and presence is an unspoken social wealth to children.
In tandem with preparing them for Adulthood, letting them out of your care is something many parents struggle with, especially if the child did not go to a boarding school or in a different geographical location for higher learning. The 20+ bond is often very hard to cut. But you have to let your child go and be his own person by reminding yourself that your role as a parent was to prepare them for independence.
Conclusion
Embodying the practices above will greatly help both you and your children as your family grows and children mature. The effort you put into raising independent, responsible, hardworking and morally upright children will pay off in ways you can’t always foresee. Embrace each challenge as an opportunity to grow, and don’t forget to celebrate the small victories and milestones along the way.