Top 5 Parenting Techniques

Refer to Cathi Gulli's article, "http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-collapse-of-parenting-why-its-time-for-parents-to-grow-up/" for more information on these points.

I have often hear people say that they wish there was a clear guide to parenting. It can be the most challenging experience that some people face in their lives. 

However, depending on the results you want personally from raising your children, here are some great tips that can help you in the difficult process.

1. Establish healthy boundaries and stick to them

According to Sax, there are ways that parents often step in to a role of consulting with children "about issues that symbolize nurturance like food, we put them in the lead.” 

He talks about how this will often bring out a natural survival response for them to be in the lead and therefore start taking an "alpha role," or in other words, bossing around the parent.

Children need to feel like they are being taken care of. My Family Relations teacher told us of an experience when he was a teenager of a boundary set between him and his parents that he broke. 

The rule was that he could drive and use the car, but he had to be back before midnight every night and let him parents know he was home. 

If he did not follow that rule, he would lose privileges to the car for a week and could not go on any dates at that time. One night, his friends took to long to get in the car and he was 30 minutes late past midnight coming home. 

He let his parents know he was there and went to bed. The next day, he was getting ready for a date he had and his dad kindly asked him where he was headed.

"I have a date tonight." His dad replied with something like, "Oh, actually you wont be able to have that date tonight. Remember when you got home past curfew? 

What is our rule for getting in past curfew?" Even with the attempt to sway his dad's rule, my teacher was unable to get out of the consequences and had to cancel his date that night.

However, the part that stood out to me the most in this story was the face that my teacher ended it with, "The interesting thing is that I felt like my dad was respecting me by enforcing that boundary. I felt like he was treating me like an adult."

How can simply enforcing one boundary help a child feel like an adult?

2. Teach them right from wrong

In Cathi Gulli's online article (referenced above), she said that, “Kids are not born knowing right from wrong,” says Sax, pointing to longitudinal studies showing that children who are left to discover right from wrong on their own are more likely to have negative outcomes in the future: 

“That child in their late 20s is much more likely to be anxious, depressed, less likely to be gainfully employed, less likely to be healthy, more likely to be addicted to drugs or alcohol. We now know this,” he says. “Parents who are authoritative have better outcomes, and it’s a larger effect than the effect of race, ethnicity, household income or IQ.”

3. Be the decider

Cathy Gulli also talks about Andrea Nair, a psychotherapist and parenting educator in London who says, it's hard for parents to learn “'[h]ow to respect their child but also be the decider' of the family." 

Gulli continues, "Part of the challenge lies in the fact that parents don’t want to fail—at nurturing and governing simultaneously—and they certainly don’t want their children to fail in their personal development, in school and at social networking." 

4. Don't hold your child to another child's standard

Most parents want to know the best way to raise them and help them be successful. Therefore, we often seek out other sources to learn from on what to say or do with our kids. 

However, it's important to remember that nobody knows exactly what to do as a parent and that there is a lot of trial and error.

 We can learn from other sources who have had success but it's important to remember that our children will be different from someone else's children and may need different kinds of support.

5. Forgive quickly

In the article, Gulli talks about Nair's book when she says "that parents must 'have a higher tolerance for things not going well.' 

How they recover from their own occasional mistake, outburst, loss of patience or bad call may say more to a child than how they are in happy times. 'We’re missing that opportunity, which is how learning works,' she says. 'That’s how we become more confident.'”

Until next week,

Kirie