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Five New Year’s Resolutions for Parents
The start of the year is a good time to make improvement in the important aspects of your life including your parenting.
Most parents I speak with admit to being on a steep learning curve when it comes to raising their kids.
My advice always for parents who want to be the best parents they can be is to focus on the basics. Excellence is any field, whether sport, business or relationships, is achieved by applying the basics consistently.
Those parents who apply the basic aspects of child-rearing consistently are most effective in terms of maximising their impact on children’s achievement, well-being and positive lifestyles.
With this in mind here are 5 basic strategies that most of us raising kids would do well to escalate in 2008. Read on and see what you think!
1. Focus more on your own resilience. Children learn what they live so if you want your kids to be resilient, optimistic or live healthy lifestyles for that matter, then start practising resilience, optimism or a living a healthy lifestyle yourself.
2. Eat more together. The longer I work with the families the more I am convinced that those with a strong food culture tend to be the closest. The regular ritual of sitting down and breaking bread together as a family unit and really valuing the food experience is underestimated by many parents. Quite simply, regular mealtime is the glue that binds families together. You just need to be patient with toddlers and young children.
3. Talk more. Want smarter, well-balanced kids? Then talk with them more. British research reveals that conversations between parents and children impact as heavily on children’s achievement levels as parents reading to children. Many modern homes actually hinder conversations as they are large, compromise-free places so you may have to work a little harder than your parents did to get some conversation happening.
4. Laugh and play more. Australian families are fairly serious places these days just as childhood is quite adult-like. Loosen up, laugh more and play more and don’t take yourself so seriously is the theme here.
5. Plan more adult-time. You are not your children. Easy to say, but hard to put into practice unless you plan for it. Research from the Work-Life Institute in New York found that busy parents who coped best brought the workplace skills of planning and organisation into their family lives. One of the things they organised was some personal and partner time. So once a week something for you and once a month plan time to be with your partner or a friend. That’s a minimum.
Here is your challenge.
Pick one or two of these basic strategies and apply them for at least a month.
Strategies consistently applied soon become routines and then they become habits. It is our basic behaviours and attitudes as parents that we habitually practise that have the most lasting impact on kids.
Michael Grose is Australia’s NO.1 parenting educator. A popular speaker and author of seven books for parents including Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change it Michael has helped thousands of Australian parents raise happy, confident kids and resilient young people. Visit his website www.parentingideas.com.au and get your Free Chores and Responsibilities Guide for kids.
© Michael Grose 2008
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