Positive Parenting Bears a Pivotal Role to Play in Building A  Healthy Family

Stronger Parents-Child Relationships

Positive parenting builds healthier relationships between parents and children. The approach makes parents more sensitive, responsive, and consistent in interactions with their children, and it makes children happier, more optimistic, and more intrinsically motivated to choose the behaviors that parents prefer.

Strong emotional bonds with their parents help children learn how to manage their feelings, behaviors, and develop self-confidence. Children are better able to cope with challenges such as poverty, family instability, parental stress, and depression.

Mutual Respect

A hallmark of the positive parenting approach is creating an atmosphere of mutual respect between children and their parents. Parents help their children understand the reasons why rules are made, so the children are more likely to follow them. By understanding feelings and reasons, we are teaching both our children and us to be more empathetic, enabling us both to better understand the world and others around us. 

Set a Positive Example

We want our children to build cooperative relationships with others, as well as to act with kindness and consideration. How we respond to our own kids’ difficult behaviors will teach them how they should react to others. Positive parenting also is an approach that sets a good model for children to follow. Children learn their behavior by watching what we do.
 “If parents respond by being irritable or aggressive themselves, children can mimic that behavior and a negative cycle then continues to escalate,” explained Dr. Metzler in the NIH newsletter.

Explain it to them for Higher Self-Esteem

Rather than yelling at a child for being a “bad boy or girl” for misbehaving, the parent instead calmly and rationally notes why the behavior isn’t acceptable and lets the child know what the consequence of his or her action will be. This process helps a child learn to make better choices in the future and develop cognitive thinking. Mistakes and misbehavior are important learning opportunities for all of us: parents and children alike. Positive parenting also gives the idea that there are no bad children, just good or bad behaviors. It focuses on learning for the future instead of punishing for acts in the past.

Using kind words and gestures, brainstorming solutions to problems together and seeking to help improve our kids’ decision-making abilities one step at a time are not only beneficial to children, but to parents as well, helping to build self-esteem and confidence in our own skills as parents and our ability to set our children up for future success.