Have you been desperately looking for highly effective child parenting strategies to deal with your children? Mind you, parenting is not easy, especially when children are very young. However, you have to adapt and learn how you can deal with your kids in the best possible way.
Being a parent is not all about commanding your children or correcting their behavior; it is also about spending quality time with them and encouraging them to speak their mind without any hesitation. If you want to become an effective parent, this blog can help you learn some meaningful strategies to help your child develop a completely integrated brain which is essential for living an emotionally balanced life.
Highly Effective Child Parenting Strategies Involve Neurological Conditioning
Parenting is indeed a tough task for most of the parents but it can be turned into a wholesome experience if children are trained to express their emotions appropriately. Most of the people do not follow practical aspect of mind-development which involves neurological conditioning of children at different stages of their life.
You need to consider a child’s brain as an independent entity for implementing an effective parenting strategy. It consists of different functions and different parts such as: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
Your role here is to help your child use all the different parts of his brain to be able to live an emotionally balanced life which may help him be more successful at any given venture.
To do that, you have to understand what integration is and why it is so important when it comes to mind-development in children. Integration is all about making your child use all the parts of his brain that include the left side and the right side respectively.
It is important because as your child grows, he learns to think in a more logical and coherent way. He develops the ability to organize his thoughts and express them according to what a particular situation calls for.
When all the separate regions of the brain work in harmony, their response becomes more calculated.
Two Brains Are Better Than One
Just like you need both of your hands to live a balanced and physically functional life, you also need to have both sides of your brain working in a well-coordinated manner. If you were to use only the right side of your brain, your life will end up riding an emotional upheaval because that part of your brain is ruled by emotions.
The left side deals with logic and reasoning and if it were to takeover, you will still end up living an unbalanced life. Thus, being a parent, you have to help your child learn to use both sides of his brain in a coordinated way as it will enable him to deal with different situations in different stages of his life in a healthy way. Using the following whole-brain strategies, involving some highly effective child parenting strategies, will enable your child to integrate his right and left hemispheres of the brain:
The Best Child Parenting Strategy #1 – Connect and Redirect
When your child is riding an emotional wave out of anger or frustration and puts forth irrational demands, you need to connect with him using your own emotions, but in a comforting and accepting way.
If you start using logic to subdue his emotional rants, the situation will escalate further and you will not be doing any better other than creating more problems for yourself.
Once you have calmed him down using the emotional aspect of your brain, you can now engage your left brain which consists of logic. Your child‘s emotions are now under control and he is ready to listen to what you have to say using logic and reasoning.
You need to connect with him with your right brain and redirect him with your left to handle the whole situation more effectively.
Highly Effective Child Parenting Strategy #2 – Name It to Tame It
If your child is dealing with more intense emotions, do not force him to share his problem right away as he may not be in the right state of mind to speak.
It is normal because anyone who is running high on negative emotions needs time to recover either in spending time in solitude or by diverting his attention to other tasks.
Just give him and yourself enough space to be in the right frame of mind to discuss the probing issue.
If this strategy does not work, you can ask him to write how he is feeling if he is not ready to express it verbally.
You can also ask him to define the experience through pictures or painting. Ask him to talk to his best friend or some other adult whom he trusts.
It certainly helps giving a name to heightened emotions to be able to handle them in a more effective way.
Building the Staircase of the Mind
Your main objective as a parent is to enable your child develop harmony between the lower and upper parts of the brain. The lower part comprises primitive aspects like emotions and feelings and it is also essential for the entire family to come together and function in communion.
The upper part consists of logic and reasoning. It is extremely useful to closely analyze a certain situation before taking any action.
It helps find an appropriate response to a particular situation which could have dire consequences if the intended response is not calculated and emotionally-driven.
However, when both the parts of your brain are integrated, you become more selective before you decide any course of action. You need to help your child learn to build a staircase between his lower and upper parts of the brain to be able to respond in a more coordinated way.
Children who learn to use both parts of their brain pave way for healthy living as they develop some of the most important aspects of life such as: empathy, morality, emotional control, increased self-awareness and the ability to plan and make good decisions.
Enable your child to integrate his upstairs brain using following strategies:
The Best Parenting Strategy #3 – Engage, Don’t Enrage
This is one of the most highly effective child parenting strategies. It is common for young children to experience raging emotions when they come across unfavorable situations.
They may react explosively and create embarrassment for their parents, especially when having a good family-time together at a restaurant.
Some parents react to their tantrums in a punishing way which may be an appropriate way to deal but it does not help a child learn the importance and core functions of close relationships.
When a child is angry, it is best to engage his emotional brain by calming him down and giving him set of choices to choose from as to engage his upper part of the brain which is logical. It helps him decide what the best course of action could be given his situation.
Effective Child Parenting Strategy #4 – Use It or Lose It
It is certainly good to engage the upper part of your child’s brain in an appealing way but you have to make him exercise it more often. The upper region of the brain is just like a muscle and the more exercise it gets, the stronger it becomes. If it is ignored, it becomes weak and loses its ability to function optimally.
As a responsible parent, you have to intentionally help your child develop his upstairs brain because when this part is strong, it naturally tames the downstairs brain which is very important for dealing with situations requiring emotional intelligence.
One of the best ways to do this is to frequently give them alternate choices and force them to come up with an appropriate decision which may best suit their circumstances.
You also have to teach them that when they do not get an anticipated outcome as a result of making a certain decision, how they can learn to control their emotions and stay calm.
Help them do deep breathing exercises to control themselves or allow them to express their feelings without any fear.
Child Parenting Strategy #5 – Move It or Lose It
If your child is not able to utilize his upstairs brains effectively, you can also ask him to engage in physical workout as movement of body also strengthens the upper part of the brain. You can ask him to play a sports game or engage him in a strenuous physical activity.
For instance, if he is having a hard time dealing with stress-related academic activities, regular exercise can help him significantly lower his stress and improve his performance.
Tell him that it is not all about studying and regular physical engagement is equally important to enhance the functions of the brain.
Kill the Butterflies!
Sometimes, children face very upsetting moments that cause them to internalize the memories associated with a particular event.
These kinds of issues can be traumatizing for them and they may appear out of control when the similar memory is triggered in wake of some past experience.
Our memories are mainly our past associations that help us decide the future course of action.
Parenting Strategy #6 – Replaying Memories
Your main goal here is to encourage your child share his painful memories or experiences that may apparently be bothering him from moving ahead in life.
It could be a kind of experience that he wants suppressed within him and pretend that everything is fine.
Just encourage him to express his feelings as if he is to tell a story. Make him think about the aspects that could be bothering him.
Sometimes, events that have occurred in the past are expressed in the future, especially if they have remained suppressed for a long time.
Child Parenting Strategy #7 – Remember to Remember
To strengthen the memory of your children, you should regularly engage them in sharing their experiences in form of stories. The more you entice them to integrate their mind with their past memories, the stronger their memory will become.
Ask them plenty of questions and keep things as simple as possible. When he gets older, you can engage your child in a more strategic way.
The United States of Me
Some children become rigid with their beliefs and aim at achieving perfectionism because somewhere deep within them, they doubt their ability and it makes them approach everything they do in a flawless way and even a single mistake in the entire process hits them hard.
It is important for parents to help their children identify their strengths and weaknesses by increasing their self-awaress.
They can draw a wheel of awareness where the child is at the center with all his positive and negative traits around him in shape of a wheel. It can teach the child to focus on his positive aspects and accept negative ones.
It can be a great tool to help a child realize that even if he is not being able to achieve his best level, he can still go through the ordeal relying on positive aspects of his personality.
For instance, if he is doing homework and it is causing him a lot of difficulty, he can learn to accept the situation and use positive self-talk to affirm that he is smart enough to nail the assignment but it is a bit difficult and may take longer than usual.
Moreover, the following strategies in this regard can be highly valuable for your child:
The Best Parenting Strategy #8 – Let the Clouds of Emotions Roll By
It is very essential for you to make your child realize that feelings can take different forms just like weather conditions and they can change.
They are temporary like snowfall, rain or hot summer. It can help them understand their feelings and treat them as they are and increase their capacity to exercise restraint when things are not under their control.
Effective Child Parenting Strategy #9 – Paying Attention to What’s Going On Inside
One of the most highly effective child parenting strategies involves teaching your children to handle their emotions is to introduce the concept of SIFT which is getting through sensations, images, feelings and thoughts that might be affecting them.
You can do this by making them pay attention to any kind of physical sensation. For instance, if they are feeling anxious, you can tell them that the feeling denotes butterflies in the stomach.
This can help them relate to the stiffness caused by tension in their body every time they are feeling nervous and then they can learn to calm down by taking deep breaths.
Effective Parenting Strategy #10 – Exercise Mindsight
To help your children integrate in the best possible way, you need to increase their awareness, especially if they have a habit of fixing their attention on one particular issue which could be bothering them.
You can teach them to get back to their hub, center, and learn to shift their focus on other aspects. This may not happen overnight but you need to give them all the right tools to help them integrate wholly and deal with such feelings in a more effective way.
The Me-We Connection
Apart from healthy personal development of your children, you also have to work on instilling a sense of empathy and compassion for other people around them.
You need to teach them to share their belongings with their siblings or other children of their age and respect them for who they are. Young children can be very selfish and they may believe that the whole world revolves around them.
However, as they grow up, you need to take steps to make them realize that humans are social animals and they need to cultivate skills and strengths to accommodate others around them as well to make a transition from the world of “me” to “we”.
Follow the right strategy to help your child integrate with others.
Effective Child Parenting Strategy # 11 – Increase the Family Fun Factor
Among other highly effective child parenting strategies, creating a fun-loving environment at your home is also vital.
It helps your children and you realize the importance of healthy relationships. If you have more than one child, you need to make an effort to create an environment of mutual respect among all the siblings, yet, also help them realize that it is normal to have differences but they can be resolved.
Do whatever you can to connect with them, regardless of their age. If they are too young, you can perhaps act like a horse willing to give them a fun ride around the living room of your house.
If you have a young daughter, it will be a good idea to dance with her on her birthday.
If your children get upset over a certain issue, make sure that the amount of fun they have post a tensed situation weighs more than the conflict itself to create a healthy emotional balance.
All such fun-loving activities have the potential to stimulate certain neurotransmitters in the brain like dopamine and they are considered as happy chemicals.
Experiencing high dopamine levels is akin to addiction where every time you repeat a certain behavior, you get motivated to try it again.
For instance, the reason most of the children get addicted to videogames is because of the positive reinforcement they experience every time they play their favorite game.
However, some activities can be positive and others can be harmful but you have to create firm boundaries for your children.
Make sure that all their activities are properly divided in a healthy way where they can have fun time, have an appropriate time to study and even play videogames.
Effective Parenting Strategy #12 – Connection Through Conflict
One of the best highly effective child parenting strategies teaches you to connect with your children during a conflict.
Conflicts are inevitable and there is no way you can teach your children to completely avoid them. When they are in the process of growing up, they experience lots of emotional upheavals in different relationships with their classmates.
At times, some conflicts escalate to such an extent that they become even hard for a mature adult human to get over with, let alone a child.
However, you can teach them to handle certain conflicts for the sake of their own peace of mind. First, you can ask them to see things from the perspective of others who may have seemed to flare up a particular situation.
You should help them analyze the verbal spat exchanged in the heat of the moment and the accused party may had a valid reason to hold its stance firmly.
Look for nonverbal cues that may have caused a fight between siblings. Teach them how they can attune to others to identify nonverbal communication because most of the parents teach their children to listen carefully but they do not reveal the importance of noticing nonverbal aspects of communication.
Once you have helped your kid see the picture clearly, you need to teach him the importance of apologizing to resolve the conflict and move on.
Please share these highly effective child parenting strategies with others to help them deal with their children in a healthier way.
If you want more information about child/parent relationships, please read our blog ‘A Simple Guide to Non Traditional Parenting.’
I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.