How to become a calmer parent: A therapist’s guide

Here’s a simple guide on how to become calmer parents and how to deal with parenting with patience.

Parenting can be tricky. Knowing how to handle situations with the children, all the while making childhood fun for them is a difficult thing for parents to balance on. Bringing up a child also has its own set of challenges – from undergoing their growth with them to sitting with them through difficult situations to knowing how to handle them through their tantrums. Parenting also requires us to ensure that the style of bringing up we are giving to our children, should let them have happy memories of childhood, instill ethics and values in them and get them ready to face the world as they grow up and navigate through life. Addressing on how to become calmer parents, Psychologist Dr Jazmine McCoy wrote, “This is lifelong work. None of this is instant. It takes ongoing work and the goal is continuous evolution, not perfection.”

How to become a calmer parent: A therapist’s guide(istockphoto)

Jazmine further shared a guide on how to become calmer parents:

Notice: We need to notice when we are starting to get all worked up and how we are getting triggered. Once we start to notice that, it will be easier for us to deal with anger. That’s when we need to draw awareness to our own internal state and learn how to control it.

Pause: Once we recognise the behavior our body is leading to, we need to take a long pause and address it internally before responding to it.

Make a choice: we need to learn to be patient in order to become calmer parents. Patience is the choice that we need to make every moment when we are bringing up children. In case of ourselves getting worked up and triggered, we need to learn to be patient and deal with it.

Say with love: We need to remind ourselves of the love and the challenges in bringing up children, but nevertheless they mean the world to us.