In the midst of potty training, breaking up sibling spats, ensuring the safety of your children, picking up and dropping off your kids for extracurricular activities, and more, most parents don’t have tons of time dedicated to improving their parenting skills.
We end up reactive and caught up in the moment—and potentially, very stressed out.
Yet, it doesn’t take much to become more mindful of your parenting tactics. In fact, let’s first and foremost recognize that you reading this article is a huge step toward:
Mindful parenting is the idea that, “To help your child grow up, you need to slow down.” It’s also important to note that instead of trying to “change” our children, we should focus on our own behaviors since oftentimes, this is what our children mirror and learn.
So, let’s dig a little deeper. What is mindful parenting? How can you lean into it?
Mindful parenting helps us become less reactive.
It involves controlling our own emotions and responding in a manner that cultivates empathy and compassion and effectively communicates our thoughts in a positive way. This can not only help lower your stress levels, but help foster a healthy and deep connection with your children.
Undeniably, there are going to be times when it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Most importantly, mindful parenting is about doing the best we can in the moment and striving not to let our emotions get the best of us. Ideally, we want to keep anger, frustration, and annoyance in check and instead turn to more positive reactions that can foster our children’s growth.
A few examples of mindful parenting involve:
Mindful parenting can also involve understanding yourself to an extent.
For instance, work you do on yourself spills over into your parenting techniques. If you’re actively working to understand yourself and your triggers and applying these lessons to the present moment, you’re also practicing mindful parenting!
The five main factors of mindful parenting include:
Research has even shown how mindful parenting can foster and strengthen parent-child relationships, as well as enhance the well-being of parents and the entire family. In other words, it’s well worth exploring and practicing!
Related Article: 5 Tell-Tale Signs of a Narcissistic Parent & How You Can Cope
Here are a few tips to help you foster more mindfulness as you parent your children.
Play is one of the many things our children can help us re-learn.
In fact, instead of making tasks out to be chores or “have-tos,” try to make them a game. Kids love to play.
For instance, instead of making bedtime a drag for everyone, you could create a whole game around whoever falls asleep faster will win a reward in dreamland or something similar (This is just me making stuff up on the fly, but you get my gist).
Anger usually arises from hurt feelings or frustrations over our needs not being met.
Children and adults are no different in this regard. When anger simmers to the surface, try to understand it (for yourself and for your kids).
From there, you can try to resolve it by meeting the needs that are going unmet.
So, you didn’t get the reaction from your children you thought you would.
That’s okay! We are human, and we make mistakes. But we can also learn from these mistakes. We won’t always be perfect, but we can try to be better next time.
Reflect on what happened and come up with a plan for how you could do better next time. From there, it’s all about remembering your plan and implementing it accordingly.
This sounds super simple, and we did mention it above.
But for a quick thought experiment: What would happen if you didn’t react and listened to your children first? You’d probably uncover things you could do differently.
However, this is also important even when you disagree. It can help you understand your children and help meet the needs they require.
Gratitude practice fosters an appreciation for our life.
We become more joyful and more content rather than resentful and angry. Each day, try to come up with at least five things you are grateful for, and really aim to feel that gratitude. This will help you carry these feelings throughout your day.
Take a deep breath.
Or simply say you need a moment, and you’ll be back in a minute. Creating space between stimulus and response can help us avoid reacting and help us respond in a calm, effective, and caring way.
Related Article: How to Treat Children
Simply keeping the above in mind going forward can help you and your family lead your best lives and become closer because of it.
Your children will benefit, and so will you. It’s truly a win-win.
Plus, you can carry these aspects of mindfulness into all areas of your life, leading to greater satisfaction and closer relationships across the board.
Read Next: The 5 Types of Dysfunctional Family Dynamics & 4 Ways to Overcome Them
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