Parenting Tips from Anne
Practicing these parenting tips in your home can improve your parent-child relationship:
- Avoid being more invested in an outcome than your child is.
- Encourage free play. It fosters great cognitive skills.
- Be reasonable about what is dangerous and what is not.
- Pick your battles. Avoid strong reactions to fashion/friend choices your child may have.
- Allow your child to feel the feelings that come with disappointment.
- Don’t be quick to slap a label on your child at the first sign of a problem. See if you can help your child figure out a solution.
- TV and other kids are not the keepers of your children. Kids need time with adults to know how to act like an adult.
- Modify your parenting to fit your child’s temperament.
- Teach your child breathing skills: deep breathing through the nose, exhaling through the mouth.
- Remember there are many roads to Mecca. Be open to alternative solutions.
- Avoid manipulating the academic system on behalf of your child. It may make the child doubt their own abilities or gain a sense of entitlement.
- Remember, your job is to help raise a child that can function on his or her own, emotionally and financially (you need to teach them how to handle money.)
- Encourage your child to think for themselves.
- Give them tools for intimacy in relationships by modeling that it’s OK to disagree respectfully.