Positive parenting is an approach that is built on mutual respect and treating your child as a person with feelings and the ability to think and make decisions. The positive parenting approach means saying good-bye to “because I said so” and instead, modeling good communication skills. The power of positive parenting is that if we show our children how to communicate effectively and handle conflict, they will learn how to do it for themselves. These five positive parenting tips will help you teach your child to be a better communicator and make home life easier and happier for all parties.
5 Useful Positive Parenting Tips
1. Talk to your child at their level
Get down on their level and talk to your child eye-to-eye. Not only does this show compassion and respect, it helps your child focus on what you’re saying. As an added bonus, it teaches them to look people in the eye when they talk to them.
2. Enforce consequences
When your child understands that their actions have consequences, they’re more likely to think and act accordingly. There are good consequences, like complimenting someone and making their day. And bad consequences, like saying something mean that hurts someone’s feelings. All actions and words have consequences and your child needs to understand that so they can use their words and actions better. Of these positive parenting tips, this is very useful to helping them chose their best behaviors all on their own.
The consequence should match the action so that your child can easily relate the two things. For instance, if they don’t pick up their toys that they were supposed to, the toys can be taken away for a bit. If they push another child, they can apologize and comfort the other child.
As long as there are consequences for bad behavior, your child will start to learn better behavior. And likewise, if you catch them doing something good like sharing a toy and you compliment them, they will be more likely to repeat that behavior.
3. Explain why
Telling your child to do something or to stop doing something isn’t enough. They don’t understand why they need to do or not do it. Once they understand there’s a good reason, they can accept what you’re telling them better. For instance, “don’t stand on the chair, you don’t have enough balance and you could fall and hurt yourself” is better than a simple “get down.”
The “why” is the teachable moment for your child so explain your decisions and requests when possible . This positive parenting tip will help produce responsible children that reason out their own actions before they do them.
4. Talk to them like a person
Don’t talk down to your child. Instead, use age-appropriate language when communicating with them and talk to them as you would an adult. If you’re running errands, tell them about where you’re going and why, what you need to get, and how long you think it will take. This allows them to feel part of what’s going on instead of just being dragged along. It will also allow them to predict what’s happening and what’s expected of them, eliminating tantrums over being confused.
5. Give children warnings
Of all the positive parenting tips, this one makes things so much easier for both the child and the parent. Instead of springing a change on them, give them a “heads up” type of warning to allow them to mentally prepare. “Dinner will be ready in 10 minutes so you will need to clean up your toys soon and go wash up.” “We need to leave soon so you have 5 more minutes to play.” Giving them information and time to adjust to what they need to do will help eliminate the tantrums that come with sudden change.
The positive parenting tips will help children learn to communicate better, understand what they need to know, and reduce outbursts of frustration. Simply put, treat your child as you would want someone to treat you, communicate on their level, and be clear about what your expectations are. Be sure to share your own positive parenting tips in the comments! Do you have any stories to share about your experience with putting positive parenting tips into practice?
Thanks for sharing! Today is my first day reading parenting blogs and I’m overwhelmed by all the support we have! Thank you again for sharing.
We have a 5 year old and 3 year old. We are adjusting to all day kindergarten and have had some learning opportunities around acting out once home. I feel we are exhausted from the day and try to respect a little down time and a snack when first getting home. At times this doesn’t help. When we are upset or out of line it is like talking to a wall however if we wait to talk through the situation it isn’t immediate. Struggling to figure out how to handle these little outbursts. Any thoughts or articles to help navigate would be appreciated.
Overall he is a great kid and often tries to please but not sure what to do when he gets upset and won’t listen as we try to talk through the negative action/behavior that he just displayed.
Trying to avoid the tantrum through making sure he gets a healthy snack and some rest time is a great start. You may also want to set him to work doing some low key activity to help him keep his calm like reading a book or being read to. If that doesn’t work and he becomes unreasonable and won’t respond to you trying to talk him through it, it may be best to give him some time to calm down. Just say, “Since you are so upset, I will give you a few minutes to yourself to calm down and then we can try talking again”. Then give him some time to finish his meltdown either there or in his room while you remove yourself and go on about your business. Sometimes they just need to get it out and they need to have that non desirable behavior ignored so they can see you won’t bend to their will.
Hey family focus blog,
Excellent article !! Well done , It is very interesting positive parenting tips! It helps me alot .Thanks so much for sharing this article. keep up good work
Explaining why has always been one of the hardest things for me. I grew up with parents who never explained why, their reason was always “because I said so”. But because this was one of my biggest pet peeves as a child it is something I try and work on with my kids so they can understand why things are happening instead of just accepting that it is ok.
I think explaining is always the way to go when possible. However, my children also understand that though I stop to explain things most of the time, occasionally, I may not have time or the situation may not allow for it. They know when I say, “Do it now”, not to argue or ask questions but that they can ask questions later if they want to.