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Positive Parenting Brings Positive Results
One of the best gifts we can give our children is the ability to look positively at the world. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always find it easy to do that myself, but it’s still a trait I’d like my kids to have. It just makes you feel better about life if you can see the good things around rather than concentrating on the negative.
Like everything else with parenting, it’s best to display the behavior you want to encourage rather than to talk about it. If I want my kids to feel good about getting out the house on a rainy day and going to school, I’d better make sure that I’m not stomping around the house each morning in a sullen panic worried that I’m going to miss the bus to work.
Obviously, situations are going to come up that are a challenge, rather than a pleasure. As much as I’m able, I try to find something positive in a problem, even if it’s only a tiny glimmer. One of the tricks I’ve learned to help me deal with problems is simply to accept them; to surrender to the chaos rather than fight it. By doing this I avoid spinning into a negative cycle of “Why do things always happen to me?” and instead just accept that there’s a problem.
To give you an example: My kids often have trouble agreeing on a DVD to watch. After trying a variety of solutions, including have Mom & Dad choose the movie; taking turns (which became unmanageable to track); and simply banning TV watching (that lasted three days, and was not a great success) we finally hit on an workable answer. One child picks out three movies, and then the other gets to choose from amongst those three. Both of them are involved in the choice, both feel acknowledged, and everyone’s reasonably happy.
It’s important to look for opportunities to model positive attitudes, and with some practice you can see them all around you. Last week I was grocery shopping with the kids and they had just run out of the breakfast cereal we usually buy. Instead of my instinctive reaction … which was to whine … I remembered to be positive. I told the kids they could each pick a cereal we’d never tried before and maybe that would become our new family favorite.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that they both chose absolutely horrid cereals full of sugar and artificial coloring. But they felt good about getting to choose, and thankfully even they agreed that the new cereals weren’t a patch on our old reliable. And I’m positive about that!
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2 Responses to “Positive Parenting Brings Positive Results”
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What a great idea for involving both kids in choosing which DVD to watch! I really like that!! It’s kind of how my husband and chose our football picks this week for the office pool. We each picked all the games and then compared lists. We only had 6 choices in common so I just had to eliminate one and enter the other 5. This way we only spend $5 instead of $10 to enter two entries.
Positive parenting is something my husband and I have been working on for quite sometime. It’s challenging sometimes to focus on the positives. Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed reading this post.