Positive Parenting Children Techniques You Should Be Using!

As parents, we sometimes feel cursed by the bratty behavior kids are wont to display on cue.

We often shrug them off as a "phase thing," something we hope will go away by the time they grow older. In doing so, we neglect helping our kids grow emotionally, which in turn may cause them to be emotionally handicapped for the rest of their lives.

Your child will develop their emotional faculties sufficiently by the age of 8. If you are unable to train your children and expose them to a loving, functional environment, it may be too late already. By the time the child reaches this age, his or her temperament is pretty permanent.

The Marshmallow Test

Researchers conducted a test of emotional intelligence among children. The test involved promising the children an extra marshmallow if they were able to keep from touching a marshmallow placed in front of them for 30 minutes.

The test suggests that children that are able to wait out the 30 minutes to get their extra marshmallow have a greater probability for success in life as opposed to those that weren't able to do so. Emotional intelligence, therefore, is right alongside Mental and Physical intelligence as markers for success.

If you want to give your children a head start in this life, they you should not neglect nurturing their emotional aspect as well as their other facets. Here are a few tips to help you teach your kids the virtues of patience, even temper, and self-control.

1. Teach your Kids Responsibility - If your kids want a pet, it might be a great opportunity to teach them responsibility. Caring for a pet can help one learn accountability for their actions and things around them. Aside from that, kids will learn to dilute the "me first" complex that children are naturally born with.

2. Be Firm, yet Gentle - Do not allow yourselves to be manipulated by children. Make it a habit to lay down reasonable laws and keep with them firmly. Be gentle, yet reasonable. From here, children will learn order, organization and respect.

3. Love in the Family - A child that grows up in an environment of love will have a greater chance of developing an even temperament, and a naturally social nature. The parents have a responsibility not only to love the children - but to love each other as well.

Studies have shown that parents that show love for each other have children that are better adjusted.

The children learn more from their models' action than from their words. Kids from families like such do not rush out of their homes by the time they are 18. They also keep close ties with parents even after they leave their homes.

4. Positive Reinforcement - You can use the reward system to help reinforce good habits among your children. Being rewarded for good things done will help your child understand that doing the right things are more desirable than the opposite.

However, you should not let your child come up with the notion that they are only loved because they do the right things. They will develop the wrong mentality that love is something you have to work for. Show them your unconditional love and spur them on to greater things.

Your children are an investment into the future. You do not really need much prodding to understand that no matter the sacrifices, rearing a happy family is always worth the pains.

Do not indulge yourself in the thought that by merely giving your kids a roof over their heads will help them grow into mature individuals.

Invest in their lives, and in their emotional quotient. As a parent, that is the best way to go.

Children are curious and ever-inquisitive individuals who are struggling to understand the full dynamics of the world around them.

It is important that kids should be treated equally, especially when it comes to issues that directly affect them. It is a usual notion of parents to not pay particular attention to the comments, suggestions and objections of their kids.

Children will know and sense that by doing so their parents are ignoring them. As an adult and the person with a broader mind compared to the children, you should make sure that the child feels loved and listened to.

Listening is a key activity in the process of communication. Communication is very necessary to pave the way for a harmonious relationship between the parents and the child. Without communication, a gap can appear that can affect the long-term relationship of both parent and child.

Since children are still in their developing years, it is important that parents instill in them the thought that the parents are behind them, supporting them all the way in every minor and major endeavor.

Listening is very essential in paving the communication line between the child and the parents. Through listening, the parent communicates verbally that they are willing to understand, reach out and help the child in his every decision.

Unusual habits
Experts assert that kids with busy parents tend to feel like they are being ignored and that they feel unwanted. That feeling of obscurity will dampen the child's self-esteem and can manifest later on in life in many different forms of behavioral problems.

Unusual habits develop when the child feels like his parents are ignoring him. Temper tantrums are often developed in children who aim to catch the attention of people. They get the attention but not in the way they wish. Read more about the temper tantrum subject in an earlier chapter.

Biting habits also arise from that feeling of being ignored. The child may not know that it is wrong to hurt others just to attain attention from parents. And so such habits not only become awkward and annoying, but also destructive.

The key to preventing these habits, or curtailing them when they are already developed, is to listen to the child's every need, demand and comment.

How to effectively listen to your children
Here are several simple guidelines that will help you listen to your children, or at least give your kids the impression that you are indeed listening.

* Listen attentively. If your child asks a question, be sure to drop everything you are doing and listen intently. Maintain eye contact with the child to establish the feeling that you are really listening. Of course it would advisable if you would genuinely listen.

* If a child asks you the same question over and over again, ask him to say what your previous answer was. If the answer was modified, correct him.

* Listen to understand. The main purpose of listening, aside from setting the impression that you are not ignoring your child, is to understand and see things in your child's perception. You will learn a lot from doing so, and you surely can relate because you were also once a child.

* If you inevitably need to respond or explain something, do so in a manner that is easily comprehended and understood by the child. Be calm and never show annoyance if the child keeps on asking questions.

Remember, if you do not give your child the chance to talk, his self-esteem will be dampened and he would always think that it is not effective to even try.

Listen to your child and see how you could make him a better person simply by lending him your ear.

Every child undergoes a period when he is becoming less patient and is somehow frustrated at how limited his abilities can be.

This disappointment and struggle to grasp greater control of things is vented through an activity referred to as temper tantrums.

Experts claim that temper tantrums often manifest in children aged one to three years. Temper tantrums are usually the nightmares of parents who often also grow impatient over their children's terrible behavior.

Temper tantrums are manifested through crying, screaming, and breath holding, hitting and kicking. The loud screams and cries usually annoy people.

The parents almost always want to just run out of the location where their child is throwing tantrums. Alas, they can never do that.

Psychologists remind parents that temper tantrums are a normal part of the child's growing up years. Some children may throw up regularly, but there are also some who occasionally burst out. It's also true that some children are more prone to developing the habit of throwing temper tantrums and some tend to cease the habit.

Another setback to this behavioral problem in children is that you will never know when a child will suddenly burst out, and you can never tell where. You might have seen children throwing tantrums at places like the movie house, the grocery, and church or even at the bank.

That is why it is imperative that parents know the basics over handling temper tantrums in their children. First-time parents especially should be educated about the subject. All parents, even those who already have children, can also use a refresher.

Moreover, experts warn that not all parents are dealing with the temper tantrums appropriately. While others may be satisfied with their small strategies to pacify their children, it is not assured that those schemes are healthy.

Dealing with a child who is throwing temper tantrums
There are many simple means on how parents can deal with their children amid a temper tantrum episode. Take note of the following simple guidelines.

Be sure to be firm and in control. Moreover, do not throw tantrums yourself. Spanking and yelling at the child during such episodes is not helpful. Doing this only triggers the child to cry and scream louder.

If it is clearly indicated that the child is having tantrums just to get something, remember not to give in to the child's demands. Children may be small and younger, but do not underestimate them.

If you pamper them just to keep them quiet, you may develop an impression that he should just throw tantrums whenever he wants something or whenever he wants a person to do something for him.

When the child throws tantrums at home, just put him in a room or his crib, where he can scream, kick and cry as freely as he chooses. Let him ventilate his frustration. Within a few minutes, he will tire and realize that there is no point continuing the activity.

It may be significantly annoying hearing the child do so, but endure it. If the child is put in a room, then close the room until crying ceases.

If you cannot leave your child alone while he is having an episode, just sit away from him. Do not lift a finger or try to pacify him, let him do it voluntarily. Avoid developing eye contact with the child during the tantrum episode.

If you happen to be in a public place when the tantrum occurs, take the child to the car. Put on his seatbelt and let him vent his frustration inside. You may opt to remain inside or step out of the car during the duration of the episode.

If, unfortunately, you are in a long line in a grocery, let the child have his moment. Still, do not try to pacify him. He may be smart enough to capitalize on the fact that there are other people around just to get what he wants.

Ignore the nasty comments and the glares of all other people in the line. It is funny how the line will move quickly when there's a child throwing tantrums. Of course, the cashier will aim to move faster just to get rid of the child. That way, you are doing everyone a good and practical favor.

Talk to your child after the temper tantrum episode. Emphasize that what he did was wrong and very inappropriate. Toddlers also understand what his parents tell him, so talk to him also as gently and as patiently as possible. Teach the child the habit of just saying, "I'm angry!" whenever he feels frustrated and disappointment.

Seeking experts' help
Of course, there are situations when the parent should start seeking professional help, like when the parent still feels his measures are inappropriate or when the parent becomes uncomfortable with the recommended responses to the episode.

Professional help should also be sought if the child starts hurting himself amid tantrums, or if he learns to be destructive and throws objects.

Sometimes, tantrums can also be mistaken as regular crying sessions, when the child could not express unbearable pain or discomfort. He may be feeling ill, so check the body temperature for any indication.

Children are born with tantrums. The best way parents can deal with the situation is to be in control. Remember that when your child throws another temper tantrum.

You don't have a dozen children for you to have your own team. What you see in the movie "Cheaper By The Dozen" maybe cool but that is very painful to your wallet.

Two or three children are enough to teach them about teamwork and letting them do their share of chores can do this.

Convince your children to get the job done. A majority of parents have to beg, cajole or even bribe their kids to assist in the household chores. Yet they still end up to be the one mowing the lawn, washing the dirty dishes, making the beds and walking the dog.

Parents often ask this question, "How can we make our children do the chores around the house? More importantly, how do we make them do it without being reminded?"

Chores are the building blocks children need in life. They teach them basic skills and help build personal responsibility. It also teaches them a sense of duty and importance.

Getting chores done will be a lot easier if parents motivate their children by saying that this is a team effort. Their household is the base and each one is a game player. Therefore, the action of one affects everyone, so does one's inactions.

Failure to clean the bathroom as scheduled means everyone will have to take showers on grimy floors. Failure to walk the dog means a member can simply step on poop inside the house.

Designating chores to the children not only gets the job done, they also help in children's growth development.

1. Parents can make their child feel important by letting them know that they need an extra pair of hands.

2. Parents can spend more time with their children by teaching them how to do some household work like laundry, cleaning and cooking. Then they can let their children do these themselves. In that way, the children are doing the chores, bonding and also learning how to do it together.

3. Parents must designate the chores depending on how old the child is. Expected chores should be suitable to the child's ability and skills. Sometimes, for a young child, helping out in the house gives him the idea that he is important - and a crucial part of the team.

4. A majority of the chores are located in the kitchen. The kitchen is the heart of the home. Parents can fix up a schedule on who would do the dishes, the cooking, setting and clearing the table.

5. Laundry is also important and it is advised that children are taught to do it at an early age. By putting their dirty clothes in the hamper, children are already taught the basic laundry rule. As they get older, they can be taught how to sort out the laundry and assist in folding and putting away the clothes. If they are old enough (probably late teens), they must already know how to run the washer and the dryer. This is done before they go off to college.

Teaching children how to do chores is easy. Motivating them how to do their share is another thing.

Here are four factors motivating children to do the chores themselves:
- Parents must serve as responsible models by doing some of the housework themselves.
- Parents must have a caring and nurturing relationship with every child.
- There must be cooperative culture inside the home. Help each other out and do things together.
- Parents must look at chores as opportunities for them to teach their children values and life skills.

Children need different levels of support and help at different ages. Parents must learn how to work side by side with their young children. They older they get then the less the parents must be hovering beside them.

Some households reward children doing chores by giving them an allowance. This shouldn't be connected to fundamental chores. Chores and allowance must be separated. By accomplishing chores, the child must feel that the action he completed is fulfillment itself. He does not need to get money to feel compensated.

An important point to remember is that parents must try to instill in their children why chores must be done. To add flavor to it, they can give a pep talk on how they, as a family, are one team and there's pleasure in work when everyone is responsible and productive.

For the nervous child the passage from home to school life may involve considerable mental strain.

He may be morbidly self-conscious and timid, or, unknown to himself--because he has as yet no power of self-analysis and has no opportunities of comparing himself with others--he may have developed certain eccentricities.

In most cases the plunge into school life will
be taken well enough; in a few the little vessel will not right itself, and proves permanently unseaworthy.

No doubt as a rule a private school will have preceded the public school, and this gradation should make the entrance to the public school a lesser ordeal. But it often happens that it is just in the case of the nervous child that this intermediate stage has been omitted, and that his thirteenth birthday finds him still in the home circle.

If the boy's father has first-hand knowledge of life in the lower forms of public schools, his experience may enable him to form some estimate of the effect of school life upon the nervous system of his son. It is when parents or guardians have no such experience of their own to guide them that mistakes are most liable to be made.

I can myself remember the unhappy state of some solitary and eccentric schoolfellows of mine who aroused the resentment of "the Herd" by their behaviour or opinions. If it is clear that the boy has a peculiar temperament and is likely to suffer in this way, some via media must be found.

The home has failed so that he must leave home
and come under the influence of some one who understands the nature of the difficulty and can adapt the boy to school life. A change of
environment of this sort as a preliminary to the public school is often all that is needed.

If his age permits, every effort should be made in this way to obtain for the nervous child who has developed peculiarities or faults the benefits of a public-school education.

Some types of nervous children will show immediate improvement when they go to school. The boy who is passionate and disobedient, and whose parents cannot control him, is best at school.

Boys who, from being much with grown-up people, have become too precocious and have acquired the habits and tastes of their elders, will dislike school at first, but it will do them good. Their fault shows that they are quick to learn and sensitive to the influences of others, and they will soon adapt themselves to their new surroundings. Boys who are dreamy and imaginative, who early adopt a "specialist" attitude towards life, who, however ignorant they may be of everything else, cultivate a reputation for omniscience in some particular subject, such as Egyptology, astronomy, or the construction of battleships, are usually nervous boys whose symptoms will disappear at school.

Where undue timidity, phobia, or habit spasm is present, the question is more difficult to decide. Every individual case must be studied as a whole, and our object should be not unnecessarily to deprive the boy of the wholesome training of public-school life.

There are parents who from sheer ignorance add to the difficulties which the boy encounters in going to school. Failure to appreciate very small points may cause unnecessary suffering.

To be the only boy in the school to wear combinations is not a distinction that any new boy craves, however strong his nerves may be. A friend of mine still relates with feeling how, twenty years ago, he arrived at school with shirts which buttoned at the neck! At night when every one else in the dormitory was asleep he sat for hours on his bed, miserable beyond words, removing the buttons and doing his best in the dark to bore buttonholes which would admit what every other boy in the school had--a collar stud.

With girls perhaps this question of fitness for school life does not arise in so urgent a way. Girls are usually older when they go to school, and girls' schools are perhaps less terrifying and more like home.

There is, however, one important point which should be borne in mind. The date of the onset of puberty varies much in both sexes. If the boy grows to a great hulking fellow at fourteen, and even displays a desire secretly to borrow his father's razor, he is at no particular disadvantage as compared with his fellows.

He is so much bigger and stronger than the others that he may thereby early enjoy the distinction of playing at "big side," or of getting a place in the school Eleven.

He is probably much envied by those of the same age who, with the aid of their youthful aspect, can still occasionally extract compensation by inducing the railway company to let them travel to school at half fare. But with girls it is different.

Many at fourteen or fifteen are children still; some are grown up, with the tastes, feelings, and attraction of maturity. Those who have developed fastest are often, for that very reason, kept backward in school learning. Often they are nervously the least stable.

Now that large schools for girls on the model of our public schools are become the fashion, such precociously developed and nervously unstable girls are apt to find themselves in the very uncongenial society of little girls of twelve or thirteen.

The elder girls commonly hold aloof, while mistresses are apt to view this precocious development with disapproval, and to attempt to retard what cannot be retarded by insisting that the young woman has remained a child. I remember being called in consultation by a surgeon who had been asked to operate for appendicitis upon a girl of fourteen.

I found a tall, well-grown girl, with an appearance and manner that made her look four years older. I could find no signs of appendicitis, but I learned from her that she had been for three months at a large girls' school, and that in a few days' time her second term was due to begin.

As we became friends, she agreed that her appendicitis and her resolve not to return to school where she was unhappy, were but different ways of saying the same thing.

She was an only child who had traveled a great deal with her parents, had found her interests in their pursuits, and had grown backward in school work.

The little girls with whom she was expected to associate seemed to her mere children. The elder girls did not want her friendship, and snubbed her.

I prescribed a change to a small boarding-school with only a few girls, where age differences would not matter so much, and where she could make friends with girls older than herself, though not more mature.

Into their school life we need not follow the children. Happily the time is past when schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were incapable of understanding their charges, and confounded nervous exhaustion with stupidity or timidity with incapacity.

And so we come back to the point from which we started:

The nervous infant, restless, wriggling, and constantly crying! The nervous child, unstable, suggestible, passionate, and full of nameless fears! The nervous schoolboy or schoolgirl prone to self-analysis, subject-conscious, and easily exhausted!

And how many and how various are the manifestations of this temperament! Refusal of food, refusal of sleep, negativism, irritability, and violent fits of temper, vomiting, diarrhoea, morbid flushing and blushing, habit spasms, phobias--all controlled not by reproof or by medicine, but by good management and a clear understanding of their nature.

The hygiene of the child's mind is as important as the hygiene of his body, and both are studies proper for the doctor. Neuropathy and an unsound, nervous organisation are often enough legacies from the nervous disorders of childhood.

Our children deserve to learn important lessons from us and to acquire important habits with our help.

They need help in learning what matters to us. We want our children to grow up to be responsible adults. We want them to learn to feel, think, and act with respect for themselves and for other people. We want them to pursue their own well-being, while also being considerate of the needs and feelings of others.

Today, there is wide recognition that many of our children are not learning to act responsibly while they are young. Studies show that many children see nothing wrong with cheating on tests. Some see nothing wrong with taking things that don't belong to

If proper attitudes and behavior are not learned early, problems can mushroom with even worse consequences when children are older. As crime has increased, teen-age offenders have shown less and less feeling for their victims.

But even for the youngsters who will never commit a crime, it is better to learn responsibility when they are young, rather than when they are older and they have to change bad habits.

Many parents will also want to share with their children deeply held religious and moral convictions as a foundation for ethical behavior. This booklet discusses habits of fairness, respect, courage, honesty, and compassion that responsible people share, and it can be used by parents with different beliefs.

As parents, we can give our children the best in us by helping them acquire habits and character traits that they can rely on in their own lives. If we help them lean to take pleasure in thinking and behaving well, they will have the best chance to lead good lives as individuals and as citizens in the community. This will be true no matter what unpleasant situations or bad influences they come across.

What Do We Mean by Responsibility?

None of us is born acting responsibly. A responsible character is formed over time. It is made up of our outlook and daily habits associated with feelings, thoughts, and actions.

Responsible people act the way they should whether or not anyone is watching. They do so because they understand that it's fight and because they have the courage and self-control to act decently, even when tempted to do otherwise.

We want our children to appreciate the importance of being responsible. We also want them to develop the habits and strength to act this way in their everyday lives. Learning to be responsible includes learning to

* respect and show compassion for others;

* practice honesty as a matter of course;

* show courage in standing up for our principles;

* develop self-control in acting on our principles;

* maintain self-respect.

Respect and Compassion for Others

As part of bring responsible, children need to respect and show concern for the well-being of other people. Respect ranges from using basic manners to having compassion for the suffering
of others.

Compassion is developed by trying to see things from the point of view of others, and learning that their feelings resemble our own.

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