Supercharge Your Parenting Skills

Parenting issue is very topical for me these days. I love children and spend a lot of time with them. I have decent experience in teaching English for groups of preschoolers in kindergartens, as well as several years of parenting my step son, and now I have a baby-daughter.

I would say that parenting is a challenge, and an incredibly difficult one, but still I enjoy it very much, maybe because I definitely see the outcomes of the effort I'm making in parenting, I see that my methods work and in long run I'm the one who benefits from it all, as children I'm always able to reach an agreement with children, and I never spoil them in any way...

Obviously there’s no one single recipe how to do parenting, that is why it’s very important to develop and improve your parenting skills. I'm a person who embraces self-development and I'm very happy to learn new things and see that today know and am able to do a little bit more than yesterday.

For now I’ve developed my list of parenting tips which are definitely working for me, hope you'll find them helpful as well. Enjoy!

• Whatever the issue – be an example for your child
  Most possibly you’ve already noticed how our children pick up our way of behaviour and tend to copy it. This is the key to parenting. It's not going to work if you teach a child to behave in one way and do yourself otherwise. Your child needs to see and feel that what you teach him or her is the thing you yourself truly believe in and support.

• Respect your child
  Do not act as if your child is your property. A child has his or her own needs and interests, and the best way between a parent and a child is to discuss things and find a compromise and a happy medium between the needs and desires of a parent and a child.

• Make sure they listen
  Whenever you speak to your child, make sure he or she listens to you. Do remember, that usually it is not child’s fault that he or she does not listen. It's not their intention. Usually children are very much in to their games and engagements. Parents, though, are too busy with their chores and issues so they are not willing to come over to a child and have a proper quality talk. It’s easier just to say or shout something out from a distance, repeat it for several times and then do whatever child did not do yourself, later maybe to complain on your children misbehaviour. It's important to come up to the child, especially a young one, squat so that your eyes are on the same level as the eyes of the child, make eye contact and then begin the discussion. At first, it'll take more time, but this is the way how your child will truly hear you, you'll discuss things and figure everything out, and eventually your kid will be the one who listens to you and respects you, thus causing you less problems and difficulties.

• Keep your promises
  If you say something – make sure it accords with your actions, do not make empty promises. This is the only way your children will obey you, believe you, as well as they will do the same to you in return.

• Teach to listen and keep promises
  In order to keep tips 3 & 4 effective you need to teach your children to listen and keep promises. To do this it’s very important that you do not repeat anything several times. Of course, cases when the child did not actually physically hear you do not count. In other cases, you need to ensure that when you've said something once – it's the last time you say it for this situation. Next step is actions, not words. Your children do believe you, they do respect you, and as a result they do obey. This should be true the other way round as well: if they say something – you’re sure they are honest and there’s no need to investigate any further. The drawback here is that this is very difficult emotionally and time consuming to reach, but it’s rewarding afterwards.

• Improve your parenting skills continuously
  This is something I acknowledged just lately. Obviously we all make our mistakes. Even if we’re experienced parents there surely are cases when we fail to deal with a situation: when we allow our children something we did not want to, or when we snap at kids in despair, when we do something we are not proud of later… It’s very important that we analyze the situation, maybe read some literature on the subject in order to enrich our knowledge, and are ready to behave in a different manner next time.

Parenting is not a one-sided relationship. You teach your children, and there's no doubt your children are teaching you. Make sure your children are not the only ones who learn their lessons. :)

*This article has been previously published on my personal blog wifeinfocus.com. Here it's edited and updated.

Pictures from Pixabay

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Thanks! :)