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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 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 be exposed to all of the issues you face in the adult world.

Tip 3: Use of devices and social media - children’s 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 not easy, but it is wise to 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 result from an emphasis just on punishment.

Tip 5: Model positive behaviour - kids tend to learn from what they see you doing, not just what they hear you say. For instance, 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 a question of 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 option just being you wanting them to get dressed and them not wanting to, offer them two options that point things in the direction that that you want them to go. For instance, ‘Do you want to wear your shorts or your long trousers today?’

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 trying to achieve minor changes in behaviour. Ideally, you might never need to use the most serious of negative consequences.

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

Tip 10: Ask questions - kids love asking questions. But when they do ask you a question, a good approach is not just to give them the answer. Respond by asking them an age-appropriate question about what it is that they are trying to find out about. So if they say, ‘Why does X happen?’ you can respond with ‘Why do you think it happens?’ and then if the conversation goes in the direction where there are a number of possibilities, ask them which one they think is right. This helps them to think in more complex ways and also has the advantage that sometimes with tricky questions, it gives you time to come up with an appropriate answer.

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 that 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 you to do this whenever possible, but also to make sure you particularly focus on doing it when things are under pressure. This pressure can be because you are under stress due to reasons unrelated to the child or for reasons relating to you trying to manage your child’s behaviour. It is helpful for you to give random demonstrations of how much you love your kid, separate from any attempts that you are making to reward good behaviour. This helps build the bond between you and your child. This includes telling your child that you love them but, even more importantly, giving them the gift of your time to demonstrate 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 of your busy schedule to just be with your kid and to have a positive interaction with them helps to set and reset the tone of your relationship with them. Ideally, as they grow up, try to identify activities and hobbies that you both enjoy. Obviously, the fact that you actively enjoy the activity makes it more likely that you will prioritise doing it, and the by-product of this is that you will spend more time having fun with your child.

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 kid’s presence or with other adults at home, 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. This is about to become even more of an experiment as social media and devices are made even more attractive through the use of AI. 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 strangers transmitting to them values and attitudes that may be a long way from those that you want them to learn as they grow up. It is therefore important that you set age-appropriate limits for your children’s use of devices. For instance, limiting the amount of screen time when they are young. Not giving them phones when they are too young. Not always handing them your phone to keep them entertained when you and your friends are sitting around talking. It would be useful for your kids to be listening and even joining in such conversations. Have them use devices 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 from 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 regarding a child’s behaviour in contrast to 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 occurs. 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 kid outnumbers the number of negative ones. If there are more negative interactions than positive ones, try to work out how you can increase the positives. 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 difficult behaviour because what was behind it was more of an attempt by the child to get attention from you than the child necessarily really wanting to do the 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 parents 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 kid 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, how a parent would like their child to grow up provides them with 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 for 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, 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 children can behave however 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 they will need to become healthy teenagers and then healthy adults.

One way of thinking about your interaction with your kids is that on any day there might be 50 potentially positive interactions that could occur but also there might be say, 50 potential minor or major ‘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, 10 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 50 battles where they want their child to behave differently. Therefore it is often useful to let go of a number of the battles if it is obvious that you are 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 you are; how important the issue really is in the overall scheme of things; how tired your child is; when your child (and you) last ate; and, whether the last interaction you had with your child was positive or negative.

Regarding battles that you choose not to fight, it is best if you don’t give the impression that you have lost the battle to the child. It is better to create the impression that you really were not that concerned about that particular battle (which, whatever you are feeling, has some truth in it in that you decided it was not a battle you wanted to fight). If you don’t do this and your kid starts to think that they are winning all the discipline battles, then they will get the impression that it is their job to run the household rather than you. Of course, this talk of ‘battles’ with your child is just one aspect of your relationship that needs to be within the wider framework of them knowing that you love them unconditionally as in Tip 1: Promoting the bond.

Tip 7: Offer options

When wanting to get your kid to do something, the situation sometimes develops into an ‘I will or I won’t’ confrontation. For instance, you say ‘put on your clothes’ and your child says ‘no’. An alternative is for you to offer an option to your child that is different from the straight ‘I will or I won’t’ option. For instance, you 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 choose 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 misbehaves, they need to understand that there are negative consequences for behaving in the way they are. In those cases, it is important for you to have a ‘hierarchy of consequences’ available. This should start mild and then progressively build up to greater negative consequences. Ideally, you should not have to use the highest levels of negative consequences, such as grounding a child, because you have plenty of other milder consequences available for use.

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 need to be clear about how they could actually carry them out if 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 reward them and not 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 certain occasions. These can be used to provide rewards for good behaviour. They certainly have their place, but they should be used in those cases where the child’s behaviour cannot 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: Ask 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 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 themselves know the answer to something that their child is asking. A good way to discuss things with children is to not immediately answer their questions, even if you know the answer. What a parent can do is to first 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 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 age appropriate 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 that you unconditionally love them. 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. Lastly, if you are having protracted negative interactions with your child, or significantly concerned about them in any other way talk to a health professional to get advice.

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.