As a psychologist with 20 years of experience, I have worked with families at different stages of the life cycle. Interestingly, I have come to realise that it doesn’t matter how young or old your child is, there are some parenting skills that are useful and should be used across the entire lifespan of parenting.
Attachment
The term “attachment” is commonly used when talking about babies and relationship development with their carers or parents, with the first 12 months and 1-3 years often considered the most important time. I have written an article entirely dedicated to attachment on this website and have also discussed it in my book, Why Babies Need Love. However, it is never too late to work on and improve your attachment with your child or teenager, as having meaningful safe relationships is critical to their ongoing development. Your relationship (or attachment) with your child will be the best asset you can ever have in keeping them on the right path as they grow and face all the challenges associated with childhood and adolescence. Just being a constant calm presence in your child’s life can be helpful in stabilizing them when things feel shaky – in this way you are the safe haven that they know they can always come back to.
Time In, instead of Time Out
Thankfully, we are finally moving away from the use of rewards, consequences and time-outs as a means of managing behaviour. Recent times has seen a shift in the focus being on the quality of your relationship (or attachment) with your child as a means of managing behaviour. “Time in”, meaning, spending time with your child or teen when things go wrong is one example of this. So, if you’ve got a 5 year old struggling to share, a 10 year old who has hit their sibling or a 15 year who has been caught vaping, spending some time with them trying to figure out why they engaged in the behaviour they did, will do more for their self-esteem and ongoing development, then sending them into time out or handing out some other sort of consequence, that may or may not work. You might view this approach as rewarding “inappropriate” behaviour, but spending quality one-on-one time with your child or teen is likely to do a lot more to improve their behaviour, than a punishment.
Beneath every behaviour there is a feeling. Beneath every feeling is a need. When we meet the need rather than focus on the behaviour, we begin to
deal with the cause and not the symptom. Gordon Neufeld
Empathy and Compassion
Relating to your children with empathy and compassion is often about trying to see a situation from their perspective. So whether you are dealing with a 3 year old crying because someone messed up his train tracks, or a moody 15 year who comes home complaining her friends don’t like her anymore, try and see the situation from their perspective. It is too easy to flick off their concerns and minimise their worries when we’ve got our own issues to deal with. But even spending a few minutes siting with your child in their pain letting them cry on your shoulder or talk about what happened, will go a long way to helping them feel better. Even if we can’t fix their problems, knowing that someone cares and that someone took the time to sit and understand what happened to them, will go a long way to helping them feel better about the situation.
Scaffolding
Parenting is a balancing act, there is no doubt about that. It is hard to get it right but as I’ve said many times before, you don’t need to aim for perfection. But scaffolding is about giving your child or teen just enough help, so that they learn to achieve the task on their own. We don’t want to helicopter-parent them, so they never learn the skill at all, but we also don’t want to abandon them so they feel unsupported in their learning (this is when they may then look to their peers for help, who might not be the best ones to rely on). It is also important to remember that when our children are teens, they might seem like little adults who know what they’re doing, but this is not necessarily the case – still put those boundaries in place and provide just enough support so they can manage on their own. When we do this, our children get that feeling of success but also know that we have been there 100% of the way helping them.
Role Modelling and Self Reflection
I have talked about ruptures and repairs in another article on this website, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but just remember that your children are watching everything you do. As parents we are our children’s greatest role models. They are watching and learning from us from the day they are born, whether we like it or not. So one of the best skills we can have as parents is the ability to reflect on our mistakes and make amends as required. People who can’t admit to their mistakes and engage in repair, leave their partner or children feeling alone and misunderstood. But repairing a rupture in a relationship can bring two people closer together, than what they were before. The ability to regulate our own moods and manage our own issues in an emotionally mature way, is key to our children learning how to manage theirs.