5 Ways To Practice Mindful Parenting

If you’re looking forward to creating a calm environment to raise your child with a mindful approach, it is time for you to embrace mindful parenting ideas and manage your stress better, without losing your calm.

Do you find it difficult to control your anger or frustration when you react to your child’s behavior? Getting out of control, every time your child doesn’t follow instructions or does something that annoys you is not going to solve your problems or get your child to stop doing it the next time. Instead, it gives you harmful stress and negatively affects your child’s emotions.

The pressures of daily life and the stress that we go through during various situations in life could lead us to lose our patience at times. Parents often get overwhelmed due to the amount of stress and chores they handle which makes them feel helpless when they see their kids not doing what they are expected to do. Reacting immediately out of worry and anger creates more stress and does not let you help your child understand what’s gone wrong and what needs to be done. It could worsen the situation and give you unnecessary anxiety.

Mindful parenting is a great parenting approach that involves more acceptance, less judgment, and responding thoughtfully. Here are a few helpful tips to practice mindful parenting, to help you stay in control and not lose your calm when certain moments feel more than frustrating.

Your perspective

Having a negative perspective can cause you to lose your cool for every mistake that your child makes. Instead, a positive perspective that focuses on the reason behind the child’s behavior can help you figure out ways to manage the situation better and convince your child to do the right thing.

Take a pause and remember that children many times fail to respond as expected. They need guidance along the way and the way you react can either help the child learn from you or keep the behavior going.

Your reaction

Instead of reacting immediately, consider what consequence your reaction is leading to. If it will help your child do better and make you feel better, go ahead with it.

Certain reactions that are a result of extreme frustration can do more damage than good. Respond in constructive ways that will teach your children the right behavior and help them remember what is expected of them.

Triggers

Many a time, triggers such as crying, refusing to eat, or making noise could get you to react in a way you never expected to behave. These are challenges that are sometimes tough to overcome. It is more of our negative response in such moments than the child’s behavior causing the problem. It is normal for kids to do such stuff in childhood at least once in a while. But reacting impulsively to triggers can’t help you in any way. Make it a point to identify your triggers and calm yourself before approaching your child.

Expectations

You can teach the values you want to see in your children by setting an example, correcting them gently, and being there to guide them. But, expecting perfection every day is unrealistic, as there is no individual without any flaws and it applies to your child too.

While setting expectations, do it based on your children’s capabilities and interests. Communicate your expectations clearly, but do not forget to appreciate their efforts and achievements on the journey.

Reflection

Learning from your experiences helps you handle situations better and makes it possible to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Take time to reflect on what happened and how can you handle it better if a similar situation arises again. It may also help you find healthy ways to handle your anger.

Taking responsibility for our behavior as parents helps us in setting an example for kids to learn to handle situations with a positive attitude and not let frustration worsen a situation. it also helps you manage stress and focus on disciplining your child constructively with positivity and confidence.

Benefits of Mindful Parenting

• Mindful parenting helps you develop a healthy parent-child relationship that doesn’t make parenting stressful, but helps you navigate better through moments of uncertainty.
• It helps children develop skills to regulate their emotions better and learn healthy bonding as they grow up.
• Children start feeling comfortable sharing their experiences and feelings.
• A peaceful home where there is a calm environment that nurtures relationships.

Do you agree that mindful parenting is a great tool to bond better with your child without giving up what you stand for? Do share in comments.