This page is a reminder of the most essential principles to become a great parent that will help you to raise great children. Keep these principles close to bring more love and connection in the relationship with your children, but also as your guide when it comes to conflict and frustration. These principles allow you to work on your parenting skills to raise your children with sound mental health.

Let your baby attach to you from the start

Babies are ultra-dependent on their care givers because they can’t communicate yet what they need. It’s hardwired in their brains to form attachments to others and primarily they want to form deep attachments to only the people who care for their needs.

Activity: As a parent it’s important to consistently meet a baby’s emotional and material needs. For example, not letting them cry too long for food or physical closeness.

Doing this will result in babies that are more likely to grow up optimistic, sociable and trusting of other people. Also, babies will start to become extremely clingy after several months, only wanting their primary caregiver, and unwilling to be cared for by other people. This might seem undesirable (or like we’ve excessively coddled our baby) but it’s actually a good thing. It means that our baby has formed a secure attachment to us; that it trusts and feels comfortable with us.

This phase can be especially draining for the primary caregiver, but it soon passes when the baby develops the ability to know that something exists even when we cannot see it. At that moment the child knows that if you are in a different room, you will come back.

Unpack your own childhood

All new parents possess a wealth of personal experience with parenting – not from a mom or dad’s point of view, but from a child’s. The way we behave as parents may be reflected in the way we were treated as a child both positively and negatively.

Activity: Examine the positive and negative events from your childhood that stick out in your memory. Think about your emotional reactions – how did you feel about the way you were treated then, and how do you feel about it now?

1. Positive: Share with your child the same positive experiences.
2. Negative: Avoid sharing with your child the same negative experiences & overreactions you experienced as a child. Instead start empathizing with your child and give it the experience you would have wanted to receive instead.

Parents often react with anger or frustration at specific incidents because the brain is subconsciously protecting us from the feelings of longing, jealousy or humiliation we felt as children. E.g. your child dropped his food on the ground which makes you feel angry. Maybe it was because your parents also reacted like that? Become aware and start to ditch those overreactions!

Surround your child with great relationships

A child needs a great environment to grow. The basis for this environment is the relationships with those people that a child shares her home with, along with a small circle of close relationships surrounding each parent. These can include grandparents, siblings, cousins and close friends. These relationships influence how a child feels about himself and how he interacts with others, and are therefor crucial to your child’s mental and emotional health. Activities:

1. Ensure that these relationships are strong, intimate and rewarding. Make time for your child to talk and play! Tell your child how much you love it.
2. Talk with your child in positive ways and emphasize the good. Even for single parents it’s important to maintain a civil relationship with your co-parent. Children feel that their identity is tied to both parents – deprecate your partner-in-parenting, and you are indirectly deprecating a part of your child.  
3. Work through conflicts in a healthy way. Enter every argument with the aim of resolving the conflict, even if disagreement still exists at the end. Healthy arguments start by communicating your feelings to your partner, acknowledging their feelings and working through one issue at a time.  

Validate your child’s feelings

Children are frustrating. They are highly emotional creatures, largely because they don’t yet have a capacity for logical reasoning – they need to build and strengthen that capacity as they grow. When our children fly into hysterics over an issue we adults know is a triviality, like not receiving ice-cream after dinner, our first instinct is to argue against or suppress their feelings. But that’s the wrong approach. If a child’s feelings are denied, they don’t disappear. Children learn to suppress them – and that’s an extremely harmful habit.

How to deal with a child’s feelings:

• g. a child wanting an ice cream. This can be a simple acknowledgment like “You’re upset because you really want that ice-cream, right?”
• g. a child getting upset if something deviates from the standard routine. Drop your tone down to the child’s level, look your child in the eye and say, “It’s really hard for you to …. You really want …, don’t you?” Promise your child it will get it the next time.

Help your child develop sound mental health

The basis for mental health later in life is built in your childhood. Children are more impressionable and less resilient which makes it even more important for them to develop correctly. There are a few things you can do as a parent to give your child the best chance of living a psychologically healthy life.

1. Truly listen to your child: Don’t compose your reply in your head while your child is speaking, but really try to understand or feel what your child is trying to get across. This will help you form a deep, loving bond with your child.
2. Don’t be glued to your smartphone: it takes away valuable contact time with your child, it can also fill your child with a sense of alienation with the risk of making them phone addicts too.
3. Give your child the attention it needs: When children feel that they are not being seen or heard, they behave in attention-seeking ways that adults often interpret as an annoyance. If we invest time in responding sensitively to their feelings first, we can create a situation where children won’t feel the need to throw Lego everywhere in order to get a reaction.
4. Show enthusiastic interest to let your children play: When children play, they are actually working and using their imagination to construct a story. E.g. like a girl hosting a tea party for her dolls. Let them play, explore, and let them use their mental curiosity about the world around them. And for you as a parent, be enthusiastic about it!

Act as a role model

The most important mistake as a parent is to use your willpower to let your child do what you want and see this as a win or lose battle. Instead you should focus on encouraging your child by giving the good example yourself. Children just mirror your behavior so it’s important to work on yourself, instead of forcing things on our children. Learn these 4 skills to become a great role model:

1. Become tolerant: Learn to tolerate your own frustration: If you can do this, you are able to manage the situation better.
2. Become flexible: Learn to adapt to changes in circumstances, and don’t allow your own desires to cloud your judgement.
3. Become a problem solver: Learn to come up with ways of dealing with potential conficts before they develop into full-blown crises. This can be challenging because solving one problem can lead to another one.
4. Become empathetic: Learn to see and feel things from another perspective, e.g. The child’s perspective. When you master this skill, it will allow you to become more tolerant of your frustration, and will make it easier to find a solution.

Example Story

A three year old child, Flo, decided that she wanted to walk to the shops with her mother rather than ride in her stroller. Returning home, Flo stopped and sat down on a doorstep. The mother’s first instinct was frustration as she wanted to get home. But she realized that it didn’t matter when they arrived home, and after Flo finished watching the ants crawling on the sidewalk, they started off again. On reflection, the mother realized that there were other, unseen factors at play. Flo wasn’t used to walking for so long and needed to rest. She might have also been overwhelmed by the sights and sounds on the bustling street.

Lesson: It’s pointless to frame situations like Flo’s doorstep break as a win or lose. But what about encouraging social skills and good behavior?

1. Tolerate the frustration of Flo’s dawdling
2. Put off your own desire to return home and be flexible
3. Solve the problem: give Flo some rest, averting unnecessary conflict
4. Viewing the situation from Flo’s point of view, helped to handle the situation well.

Resources

The above knowledge is completely inspired by the book “Book you wished your parents had read” by “Philippa Perry”. The books is a #1 Sunday Times best-selling book and contains the most essential parenting advice.

You can buy the book on amazon on this link: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Wish-Your-Parents-Read/dp/1984879553