Positive Parenting: Forming the Foundations of Your Childs Personality

As parents we always want to give our kids the best start in life, and while the formal education system teaches them a lot, there’s still plenty that we can do ourselves. After all, we’re our children’s very first teachers; our attitudes and ideas are what form the basis of their likes and dislikes, and the foundations of their personality. Here are some ideas for positive things you can do to influence them. 

Healthy living

Health really is everything. We only get one body, so it’s important that each and every one of us looks after it as best as we possibly can. Living healthily shouldn’t feel like some kind of punishment or hard work, it should be really rewarding and can be fun too- you can encourage a love of this in your children. Get them involved in cooking and teach them about different ingredients, what they do in the body and where they come from. Make exercise fun, anything that gets you all up and moving is a good thing. It could be ice skating, bike rides, trampolining- they’ll be having so much fun they won’t recognise it as a ‘healthy’ thing to do. If you smoke then unfortunately this can pave the way for your children to do the same, many people find switching to vaping a good bridge to eventually quit. As an added benefit, the vape liquid contains none of the harmful chemicals of regular cigarettes so it’s much better for you while you quit. 

A love of the outdoors

We live in a very digital age, kids grow up addicted to phones, tablets, computers and video games. Make the ‘real world’ just as much fun as the digital world and you’ll encourage your kids to be adventurous and more active. You could go on hikes together, sites like Pinterest have fun worksheets you can all follow along to as you go. You could go camping, teach map reading and fishing. Anything that gets your kids outside rather than always being cooped up indoors. Positive Parenting: Forming the Foundations of Your Childs Personality

Kindness and empathy

Kindness and empathy aren’t traits that we’re born with (although we are born with the capacity to learn them). When we’re very young we only care about ourselves and our goal is to make sure our own needs are met, which is of course crucial for survival. But as we get older and our brain’s develop, we start being able to understand thing from other peoples perspective, and it’s a really important milestone to reach. Being able to relate to others, be kind and empathetic is the basis for meaningful human relationships. It will help your children to make friends, and later in life form a romantic connection with a partner. Teach kids empathy by being kind and empathetic yourself. If they do something mean instead of shouting at them, challenge them to think about how that would feel if someone did the same thing to them. Let them see you being kind to others and in time, they will model your behaviour.