Teaching Empathy: Essential Good Parenting Tips for Fostering Kindness
If there's one thing that's more difficult than almost all other aspects of parenting a child, it's understating their emotions and knowing what to do about them as they arise and confound you. It's not an easy thing to do, especially when your child doesn't understand what they mean, either. Luckily, there are some good parenting tips that you can use to understand where the child is coming from.
One of the best ways to deal with your child’s emotions is to teach them the concept of emotional regulation and how they can use it to control how they feel about specific things and situations. The first step is to help your child apply names to their feelings so they can better understand and control them as time goes by. Exploring what triggers these feelings is the next logical step and will be much easier to carry out, once the names are given.
Building Self-Esteem
One important thing to realize is that building up your child’s self-esteem is going to be an important ingredient in how they work the mixture of their emotions and how they deal with them. This doesn't mean that you should simply praise your child at every given opportunity. It means helping your child to develop ways to take care of their problems to build their competence and help them better understand how to compete with the world around them.
Any parent’s first instinct is going to be to jump in front of any problem that their child has to face to fix it. This isn’t always going to be the best course of action when it comes to raising your child. Teaching that same child to solve the problems on their own will have a much longer lasting and more important impact on them.
Kindness Always Matters
No matter how you choose to raise your child and prepare them for the world, teaching them kindness and humanity should always be at the top of your list. Following the tips above will go a long way toward that goal, but they’re not all it will take.
Teach by example and show your child your own, innate humanity. It’s the best way to instill them with kindness that lasts their entire lives. That’s the best gift that any parent and give to their children and is of the utmost importance.