You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.consulting/childrearing

Raising kids is fun but there are always days when it gets stressful. Here are some tips for the good times and for times when things get a little pressured.

Summary of child-rearing tips

Tip 1: Promote the positive bond - communicate that you love them and give them the gift of your undivided attention to build up the positive strength of your bond to so that if there are difficulties you are starting off from a place of positivity in your relationship with them.

Tip 2: Setting boundaries - make sure that you set appropriate boundaries for your children between the child’s world and the adult’s world in your household. There is no reason for your kids to have to be exposed to all of the issues that you have to face in the adult world.

Tip 3: Use of devices and social media - childrens’ extensive use of devices and social media is an uncontrolled experiment and no one really knows what the outcome on child development will be. If you want to bring your children up, rather than handing it over to their peer group and random strangers, it is wise introduce age-appropriate controls of their social media usage.

Tip 4: Use positive rewards more than negative punishments - this avoids your relationship getting into a very negative frame which can arise if you use a lot of negative punishments.

Tip 5: Model positive behaviour - kids tend to learn from what they see you doing, not just what they hear you say. If you want them to control their mobile use, you need to model this for them yourself.

Tip 6: Only fight battles that you can win - on any one day there may be a considerable number of things that you could like to change about your child’s behaviour. You, and they, are unlikely to have the energy and tolerance to grapple with all of these. Therefore carefully pick which battles you want to fight and ignore the rest, unless safety is involved.

Tip 7: Offer options - children enjoy having some autonomy and it is good for them to learn to make choices. Instead of the options being something like you wanting them to get dressed and them not wanting to, offer them two options that point things in the direction that they need to go. For instance, ‘do you want to wear your shorts or your long trousers’.

Tip 8: Hierarchy of consequences - develop a list of positive and negative consequences so that you don’t use up the most powerful of your rewards or punishments on getting minor changes in behaviour. Ideally you might never need to use the most serious of punishments.

Tip 9: Star charts and rewards - if necessary, you can use star charts where you keep track of your child’s behaviour and when they have reached a certain target you give them a reward.

Tip 10: Asking questions - kids like asking questions. A good approach is to ask them questions about what they think the answer is. This helps them to think in more complex ways and also gives you time to come up with an answer to their more difficult questions.

Below are more details on each of these tips.

Tip 1: Promoting the bond

The bond between a parent and child is the basic foundation which makes raising children a positive experience for both the parent and the child. Like any relationship, it is important to feed and foster this bond. It is important for parents to do this whenever possible, but also to make sure that they are focusing on it when things are under pressure. This pressure can be because the parent is under stress due to reasons unrelated to the child, or for reasons relating to the parent trying to manage the child’s behaviour. It is helpful for a parent to give random demonstrations of how much they love a child, separate from any attempts the parent is making to reward good behaviour. This helps build the bond between the parent and child. This includes telling a child that you love them but, even more importantly, giving them the gift of your time to show that you love them. Spending quality time with your child (and this does not include just sitting in a room with them scrolling through social media) fosters a good positive bond with your children. It helps you get in ‘sync’ with them and where they are at. Depending on a parent’s circumstances this can be easier or more difficult, but any time that you can carve out to of your busy schedule to just be with your child and to have a positive interaction with them helps to set, and reset, the tone of your relationship with them.

Tip 2: Setting boundaries

While it is good to be open and honest with your kids, it is a good idea to have age-appropriate ‘boundaries’ in your household between things that kids need to know and be involved in and things that only adults need to concern themselves with. There is no reason for your kids to have to be exposed to all of the issues that you have to face in the adult world. Make sure that when you are talking on the phone in your kids presence, or with other adults at home, that what you are saying at the time is appropriate for your children to hear.

Tip 3: Use of devices and social media

In a sense we are subjecting the current generation of children alive today to a massive experiment into the effect of the extensive use of electronic devices and social media on child development. No one knows what is going to be the ultimate outcome of this uncontrolled experiment. There are a range of reasons to keep your children’s use of devices under control. One reason is that, as we all know, devices are extremely stimulating compared to many things that kids do in the real world. If children are just left to use devices as much as they want to, it is likely that using them will crowd-out alternative activities that are important for their development. For instance, physical play, exploring the world, and talking and interacting with adults. As for social media use, this results in kids spending more time in peer environments rather than interacting with their parents and other adults in their social circle. In addition, they may also be being exposed to a wide range of input from adult strangers who will have various motives driving their interaction with your children. Allowing uncontrolled social media use by your kids is basically inviting a group of strangers to bring them up. The potential hazards of this approach to child-rearing range from the extreme of them being predated upon, through to thoughtless idiots transmitting to them values and attitudes that may be a long way from the those that you want to learn as they grow up. It is therefore important that you set age-appropriate limits of your children’s use of devices. For instance, limiting the amount of screen time when they are young. Not giving them phones too young. Not always handing them your phone to keep them entertained when you and your friends are sitting around talking and it would be useful for your kids to be listening and even joining into the conversation. Having them using the computer in spaces where you can keep an eye on what they are accessing. Keeping control of the social media apps they are allowed to use and stopping them using their devices in their rooms at night.

Tip 4: Positive rewards more than negative punishments

Rewarding the positive is always the best approach to take to a child’s behaviour rather than just focusing on punishing the negative. The more positive interactions that there are between a parent and child, the better the relationship is going to be. So, as a parent, you should be on the lookout for good behaviour and remember to notice and praise it when it happens. It is useful to step back for a moment from your childrearing and just ask the question as to whether the number of positive interactions you are having with your child outnumbers the number of negative ones. If there are more negative interactions than positive, try to work out how you can increase the positive ones. Sometimes there is a behaviour that you have been trying to discourage in your child and you have been criticizing them for it on quite a number of occasions. In such a case, if the behaviour is just irritating, not dangerous, it can even be worthwhile to step back and just have a week or so without criticism and replace it with plenty of positive interactions with the child. This, in itself, can lead to an improvement in the bad behaviour because what was behind it was more of an attempt by the child to get attention from the parent rather than the child necessarily wanting to continue with the bad behaviour.

Tip 5: Model Positive behaviour

Children listen to what their parents tell them to do, but they also watch what their parents do. It is therefore important for parents to ‘walk the talk’. For instance, if they do not want teenagers to have their devices at the table when having dinner, then parents should follow the same rule for themselves. If they want their child to talk politely to others, then they need to talk in the same way. If they want their child to be unselfish, then they need to act in the same way. Having children is a great opportunity for a parent to think about their own behaviour. Often the way that a parent would like their child to grow up gives them a vision of how they would ideally like to be themselves. So for parents, thinking about how to be a better parent can provide an opportunity them to motivate themselves to become the person they always wanted to be.

Tip 6: Only Fight battles you can win

It is important for kids to both know that they are loved by their parents and, at the same time, that their parents are in charge of things. Children need to know that their parents are in charge so that they can progressively learn to develop control over their own behaviour in age-appropriate steps. So, ideally, in a family there should be an overall atmosphere of unconditional love of children by their parent(s). But this does not mean that the kids can behave in any way that they like. The parent(s) needs to balance unconditional love by being able to gently shape the child’s behaviour in a positive direction. This is to help the child develop the self-control that they are going to need to become healthy teenagers and then healthy adults.

Thinking about parents being in charge, one way to look at what is happening is that on any day there might be 100 potentially positive interactions that could occur but also there might be say, 100 potential ‘battles’ over a child’s behaviour. Whether that be about them putting on their clothes, having a bath, not throwing things around, or not hitting others etc. It is useful for a parent to realise that they are only going to have the energy to fight say 20 of these ‘battles’ on a good day. So they need to pick the issues on which they are going to want to stand their ground, rather than trying unsuccessfully to fight all of the 100 battles. Therefore it is often useful to let go of a number of the battles if it is obvious that a parent is not going to be able to win them. The things to consider in deciding on whether to fight a battle or let it go are things such as: how tired the parent is; how important the issue really is in the overall scheme of things; how tired the child (and the parent) is; when the child (and the parent) last ate; and, whether the last interaction with the parent was positive or negative.

In regard to battles that the parent chooses not to fight, it is best if the parent does not give the impression that they have lost the battle to the child, otherwise the child can start to think that it is their job to be in charge of the household.

Tip 7: Offer options

When wanting to get a child to do something, the situation often develops into a ‘I will or I won’t’ confrontation. For instance, the parent says ‘put on your clothes’ and the child says ‘no’. An alternative is for the parent to offer an option to the child that is different from the straight ‘I will or I won’t’ option. For instance, the parent can say ‘do you want to put on your blue jeans today or your brown shorts’. This gives the child some decision-making autonomy in that they get to chose, while avoiding a direct confrontation.

Tip 8: Hierarchy of Consequences

Rewarding a child for being good is always a better idea than trying to punish them for behaving badly. But in some cases when a child is misbehaving they need to understand that there are negative consequences for behaving in the way that they are. In those cases, it is important for a parent to have a ‘hierarchy of consequences available’. These should start mild and then progressively build up to greater negative consequences. Ideally, a parent should not have to use the highest levels of negative consequences such as grounding a child because they have plenty of other milder consequences available for them to use.

A good way to look at this is for a parent to think of the range of severity of the possible ways in which a child could potentially misbehave and to know that they have negative consequences that could be used at each level. It is important to not ‘use up’ strong negative consequences on mild misbehaving when those consequences are better saved for any cases of serious misbehaving. Parents also need to understand that kids can call their bluff on negative consequences and they need to be clear about how they could actually carry them out if they were necessary. Ideally, a parent may never have to use the most serious negative consequences like grounding if they have a lot of other lower-level consequences for misbehaviour.

Tip 9: Star charts and rewards

Like anyone’s behaviour, kids tend to do things that bring them rewards and not to do things that do not. Star Charts are where a record is kept of how a child is behaving and they get a reward for behaving well on a certain number of occasions. These can be used to provide rewards for good behaviour. They certainly have their place, but should be used in those cases where the child’s behaviour could not be brought under control in any other positive way. Ideally, children learn to do many things for intrinsic rewards not just formal rewards from a Star Chart.

Tip 10: Asking questions

Children’s job is to find out as much as they can about the world. So they often will end up asking parents many questions about what is happening around them and to help them develop their growing understanding of how the world works. It is important to listen to these questions from your children because they are one of the main ways in which they learn about the world. However, sometimes parents are just plain tired or may not even know themselves the answer to something that their child is asking. A good way to discuss things with children is to not immediately try to answer their questions, even if the parent knows the answer. What a parent can do is to ask the child what they think about the question that the child is raising. This serves two purposes. First, it gets the child thinking more richly about what they are thinking and about ways of that they can think about the world. Second, it gives the parent time to work out what they think about the issue and what might be a helpful answer to give to their child.

Conclusion

Watching your child slowly grow and develop from a baby to a toddler to a younger child to a teenager to a young adult and then to an adult is one of the most rewarding things in life. Overall it is a matter of creating a positive environment where your child can flourish because they feel they are unconditionally loved by their parent. At the same time they need to be provided with gentle guide rails as to what is good behaviour so that they can gradually (and in an age appropriate way) learn the self control that is needed for them to grow into healthy adults.

Please note that when you are dealing with issues around child rearing, relationships, dealing with stress of any type or doing psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.