Improve Your Parent Reactions

One of the crucial parenting skills for achieving the results you want involves paying attention to your child’s reaction to YOUR reaction.

Observing the CONSEQUENCES of how you interact with your child reveals that your reactions are not just an effect of your child’s behavior, but also a CAUSE of your child’s behavior.

For instance, reacting to your child with much annoyance, complaining, criticalness and disapproval actually programs the child, on a subconscious level, to think of himself as a behavior problem, which leads him to behave in a manner consistent with that negative self-image.

Good parenting is undermined by reactions that form in the child’s subconscious an identity of a badly behaving child.

Essential parenting skills, then, include both the skill of observing how your reactions impact your child, and then gaining control of your reaction for the child behavior you want.

The child-parent relationship influences the child in ways that may not be obvious, but once you know what to look for, those ways become more clear.

For instance, parents unwittingly encourage their children to behave poorly by reacting in ways that give the child a sense of power and significance from doing so.

To encourage more appropriate behavior, practice remaining NON-reactive to your child’s behavior. Before responding, calmly assess the situation, so you can come up with a response that aligns with your parenting objectives.

For instance, if your toddler strikes you in a belligerent manner, try doing nothing in response for just a moment. Consider your goal for your child, which is to have him using his hands respectfully and demonstrating a caring attitude.
Give yourself all the time you need to come up with a clear plan of action aimed at leading your child into this higher level of behavior.

You might come up with the idea of enriching the child-parent relationship by restraining the child from hitting you again, stating in a firm but loving manner, “Let’s be kind and gentle with each other” and then lovingly embracing the child.

This may or may not change the child’s behavior. But one of the important parenting skills for solving behavior problems is the skill of patiently experimenting.

When we react with impatience, anxiety is ruling our behavior, and that causes us to feel powerless with our child.

Some will say, “But responding in a loving way teaches the child to repeat the poor behavior.” The answer to this is, “Not necessarily. It actually may be exactly the model of loving self-control the child needs to develop more loving self-control.”

If your strategy seems to fail, remain committed to accomplishing your goal with your child. Try something else. Apply patient, persevering commitment to achieving your parenting goals.

One way to improve a child’s behavior is by improving your response to what your child does WELL. Focus on the positive, catch her in the act of being helpful, kind, and careful, and respond to that in a way that helps her to feel powerful and significant.

In sum, some positive parenting skills that can be categorized as “Good Parenting” include:

* Observing the effects of your reactions
* practicing non-reactivity
* experimenting with strategic responses.