Top Five Steps to More Effective Parenting

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Becoming a parent is one of life’s biggest challenges as it essentially becomes a life-long commitment throughout the many stages of a person’s life. There is even a pool of resources specifically targeted for busy parents, which you can visit here.

However, parenting in this day and age requires more than just the techniques we grew up with. These days, parents have to adapt to a fast-paced, sensitive world that their children will be living in, creating breakthroughs within themselves as well as with their children.

Here are the top five steps that can eventually turn our parenting styles around and for the better:

1. Be the Parent, Not the Boss

While growing up in a house that establishes clear rules can be helpful in teaching children what is right from wrong, it can also become structure-focused more than relationship-centered. What distinguishes a house from a home is the environment that is based on love and openness.

Parenting transitions from being the leader to being their partner and, eventually, their support. For working parents, this is a reminder that a parent is never a boss. 

The house is a home and not a workplace. The parent leads, communicates, and encourages instead of commanding and demanding results. 

Flexibility works at home as much as it does in the office.

Teaching, guiding, and communicating with children to do what is best can also be a collaborative effort that is agreed upon by both parties. When discipline is needed, an agreement set prior to circumstances can be crafted by both parent and child.

We teach children the value of consent, and they learn this from us. When we respect what they are willing to do and what they don’t want to do, we can partner with them towards achieving things through healthy compromise, positive reinforcement, and following through consequences of actions.

2. Communicate Better and Converse Openly

Having regular conversations with children reminds them about your concern for them, your openness to who they are becoming, and your willingness to journey with them through life. 

When we have small talks alongside deep conversations, we develop an environment of honesty and trust.

Learning your child’s love language is as important as learning your own. This allows for better communication lines, where both parties can freely talk about and express their own joys and struggles. 

This also teaches them empathy and sensitivity towards others’ needs.

When misunderstandings happen as they are bound to, TEAM parenting is helpful, especially for younger children who are still trying to grasp the essence of communicating and language itself.

Openness and honesty are learned by example. Your own joys and struggles are expressed and communicated effectively to your own children. 

This shows them that having feelings, in all its spectrum, is part of being human, and how to process them when they are more challenging can be overcome together.

3. The Gift of Listening More

When a house becomes a home, children are more open to letting their parents into their thought processes. They’ll know that the environment is free from judgment but open for healthy discussions. 

Thus, this requires transitioning from being the voice of the house into being ears and hearts to everyone at home.

It comes naturally from parents to be the center of a household, especially since parents build the home and are the primary leaders when a child is young. However, sensitivity to the stages of child development needs quick adaptability when children transition into their own life stages.

Listening is a parenting skill that remains constant throughout changes in life: from when the child is in the belly, to their first words, to when they tell you how their day went, and all the way to when they are their own adults. Thus, listening more intently is essential to any parent.

4. Veer Away from CCTV Parenting

What once was known to be helicopter parenting, the CCTV parent wishes to be present only for the purpose of surveillance. This kind of parenting does not build relationships; rather, it breeds more trust issues between the parent and the child.

Trust is practiced through believing in your child the same way they believe in what you say or do. It is a two-way street that can only grow healthily across time, failures, and forgiveness.

It is good to be reminded that parenting means getting to know your child and not finding out what they are necessarily doing precisely at each moment. If we are more than what we do, then so do our children.

Spend more time getting to know who they are, who they want to become, and who they are becoming. In this rapid world, the next generation are as fast to changing and thus, requires more of our time getting to know them as they are becoming their own person.

5. Love Them Because They Are Yours

The best tip for more effective parenting is to love them because they are yours. In today’s social media, it is easy for parents to get caught up in their children’s image一as theirs, too. 

It is important, then, to focus on loving your children simply because they are your gift of life, more than what they can achieve and what they can bring home.

The Path Towards Effective Parenting

Celebrating the gift of life into your family happens every single day that they are still yours. This is what being present truly means, more than just posting their milestones. 

Healthy parenting is worked out on the everyday “small” things that children do that allow them the ability to become greater than they currently are.