A guide to building up small moments of trust and love with your little ones.
Am I doing a good job?
Parents worry about this all of the time, and with good reason. Parenting is hard, vast, unspecified, and tied to so much pressure to raise a child well.
“We’re all imperfect parents, and that’s perfectly okay. Tiny humans need connection, not perfection.” — L.R. Knost
Many people conceptualize parenting as an identity or a role, when it reality, it’s a verb — a daily choice to make small actions, over time, all in the effort of guiding a child into who they can be in this world.
It’s a noble pursuit and effort and can be guided with a few broad steps that all parents should take to lead their kids well into personhood.
#1: Respond to them
Maybe this seems simple, but it’s such an easy thing to do that we all need a reminder to do for the little ones in our lives.
From birth to adulthood, this, I would say, is the number one behavior that a parent can implement to establish trust and connection with their child. Whether it’s a baby making babbling sounds or a college student calling home when they need help, being responsive can mean the world.
Studies have found that not only does this responsiveness improve the relationship with the child, but has health benefits too, improving the child’s sense of safety.
So what does this look like?
Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist who researched many of these concepts in the 90s, describes parental responsiveness as:
“the extent to which parents intentionally foster individuality, self-regulation, and self-assertion by being attuned, supportive, and acquiescent to children’s special needs and demands”
You’re helping your child become their own person and developing a relationship with them by listening.
This can look like letting them guide you at times and show you how to do things even though you’re an adult, or listening to their feelings without needing to categorize or fix them.
It can also look like staying in tune with what they’re feeling and what they might need, anticipating desires and needs before they even communicate them to you.
I still vividly remember one Sunday evening service at church I was in the bathroom and I heard a little girl, we’ll call her Elizabeth, running in. Her mom, moments later, opened the door and called her name.
“I’m in here Mommy!” she said, and her mom found her and I could hear them trying to figure out what was wrong. What I remember most is Elizabeth, through tears, saying something along the lines of:
“You knew something was wrong because you’re a good mommy.”
Her mom was quick to reassure her, that she did know something was wrong because she’s her mom and she pays attention.
That meant the world to her daughter — who probably felt better just noticing her mom had noticed her.
In my own life, I’ve seen this fact play out a million times. My mom can tell by my tone of voice on the phone or the way I’m texting her if something’s wrong and she is quick to get to the bottom of the situation.
What sometimes is annoying and feels overbearing, is an amazing superpower of good parents that we should probably all be more grateful for.
#2: Get to know their world
This can be thought of as going a step beyond being responsive.
Don’t just be interested when they tell you something or ask a question when they share something first. Actively go out of your way to get to know them and their world.
While I’m not a parent, I’ve been able to do this countless times with my young cousins and my younger brothers and I can always feel the impact.
They appreciate it greatly when I ask about their lives and show them that they’re important and their lives matter even though they’re younger than me.
“The point of parenting is not to have all the answers before we start out but instead to figure it out on the go as our children grow. Because as they do, so will we.” — Bridgett Miller
Sometimes it looks like playing with them, asking about their friends, figuring out what they’re struggling with, or getting them to teach you something.
What’s great about this is that it can apply to older kids too.
I love looking at a teenager and asking them to teach me something, or a twelve-year-old who’s learning a new sport I’m not familiar with. Whether it seems like it or not, they’d love to share with you what they’re learning.
There’s something intimate and special about sharing our life with someone else who’s just curious about it for the sake of being curious.
A question is worth a thousand “I love you”s oftentimes.
#3: Be openminded
“Psychological inflexibility” is something that’s studied a lot with parents. While pretty self-explanatory, it takes on a whole new dimension in the parenting research world.
This article summarizes that parents struggling with the quality of psychological inflexibility have a poorer time dealing with stress. This, as we can all intuit, doesn’t do well for the quality of their parenting.
“Parents who have low psychological flexibility usually evaluate the internal experiences of stress negatively, which leads them to practice avoidance, suppression, and control strategies.”
The best kind of parent is one who doesn’t take anything as it is — but has a growth mindset that transfers to their children.
Being open-minded can be the cure to so many issues. It reduces stress and opens up options, helps you to better understand and empathize with the parts of your children that are harder for you to grasp, and grows your idea of the world as your children are growing you.
There’s also hardly anything more impactful that you can pass on to your children than a curious, compassionate, and ever-expanding view of the world and what it could be.
#4: Keep conflict at a low
Kids pay attention to the way that the adults in their lives interact with one another.
That’s why one of the biggest risk factors of a child not doing well is not the divorce itself, but a high conflict situation that results post-divorce.
Research shows us, clearly, that conflict isn’t good for kids. It makes it harder for them to have quality relationships with their parents and is linked with a host of mental health issues.
“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has or ever will have something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.” — Fred Rogers
A great thing that an intentional parent can do to combat this is to foster a problem-solving home, where mutual respect and love is practiced towards all, in and outside of the family.
And if you and your partner, or anyone else for that matter, need to have a serious conversation and work out a conflict, don’t do it in front of the kids.
Sometimes witnessing conflict from the adults in their life can be just as damaging as being yelled at or experiencing the conflict themselves.
They put themselves in the middle of it regardless of whether they are or not.
#5: Engage them in the world
One of the five steps of positive parenting, according to Triple P Parenting, is to “create a safe, interesting environment.”
They state that one of the main reasons for this being an important step for parents to take is because it’s more common for bored kids to start getting into trouble, of all kinds.
If you as a parent make a conscious effort to engage your child with the world and to allow them to seek meaningful stimulation in age-appropriate tasks and games, they will not only lean to you for help and support in that, but enjoy themselves a lot more.
“It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.” — Joyce Maynard
Let them have supervised YouTube time, where they can look up how to build things or how something works. Encourage them to ask the big questions, and learn how to fix things.
Give them open-ended toys and activities.
If they’re older, talk to them about life and the big things. Teach them critical thinking. Let them try that new club or try out for that play.
Give them an education in life and all of the good that it holds, while guiding them and supporting them through the challenges and struggles they face along the way.
No one wants to get out of the house or into college and realize that their parent never taught them about life.
Life’s a beautiful thing. Why not start sharing it with our children earlier?
As I summarized at the beginning, parenting is a daily choice to behave in a certain way towards the tiny humans in your life. And I’d say that at least half the battle is going in with the right attitude.
If you go in operating from the positive values of love, compassion, empathy, and leadership, your child will be able to feel that — even if you stumble through the behaviors or don’t know what to do.
Children are naturally grace-giving. They’ll understand. They never wanted you to be perfect, anyway. They just want you to love them and show them the world in a way only you can.