How to improve your parent-child relationship
A secure attachment is one of the best gifts that you can give your children - it sets them up for healthy relationships when they get older. Read on for our tips on how to improve your parent-child relationship.
How to improve your parent-child relationship
Parenting can be hard work. From ensuring that your children have a roof over their heads, food in their stomach, friends to play with, an education, and a life path - it’s easy to get caught up in providing for (rather than connecting with) your children. Importantly, parent-child relationships form the template for future relationships that they will have with friends, partners, and their own children. Therefore, the attachment that you form with your child is something to pay close attention to. In this post we’ll look at the different types of attachment as well as 5 tips for strengthening the parent-child relationship.
A bit about attachment and relationships
Children with a secure attachment learn that they are loved and supported. They are encouraged to explore the world, feel secure enough in their bond with their parent to venture out, and are welcomed with open arms when they return.
Research suggests that a secure attachment in infancy is linked with greater sociability, better emotion regulation, higher self-esteem and greater empathy.[1] From this secure base a child feels more comfortable navigating what lies ahead in life.
Sometimes, the process of forming a secure attachment can be interrupted. Perhaps you have a child that has been unwell, fussy, or quite difficult to settle. Perhaps you have struggled with ongoing stress, depression or anxiety. Or perhaps you’ve faced challenges in your relationship with your own parents and thus a secure attachment may feel uncomfortable.
All these things can sometimes make it difficult for you to be the parent that you want to be, but regardless of your parent-child attachment there are things that you can work on to strengthen the relationship. Read on for our 5 tips for strengthening the parent-child relationship.
TIP 1: Take care of yourself
Taking care of yourself may seem counterintuitive at first given we’ve spoken at length about focusing on your child and the outcomes of attachment for your child. However, it’s important to remember that you play a role in the attachment too!
Just like being told to secure your own oxygen mask on the plane before your children’s, it’s important to ensure you are paying attention to, and responding to your own needs. After all, if the parents aren’t ok, how can we expect their little ones to be?
Feeling stressed and overwhelmed can affect your ability to handle the daily challenges of parenting, and leach into how you interact with your children. So, tune into your own needs, know how to meet them, and schedule time to meet these needs (rather than consider them as something to get around to doing ‘when you have a spare moment). In doing so, you not only develop greater capacity to handle the ups and downs of parenthood, but being calmer also provides a more solid and secure foundation for understanding and responding to your children’s needs.
TIP 2: Put yourself in their shoes
What are your children thinking? What are they feeling? What do they need from you? It can be hard to know what is going on for them, moment-to-moment. They can sometimes seem like a puzzle and it can take a few tries to find the piece that fits.
Sometimes our children’s behaviour can be a red-herring – masking what is really going on. Take, for example, a little boy who gets angry and lashes out when you’re trying to wind up an afternoon playdate in the park. His behaviour at that point can surely seem challenging, particularly as you’ve attempted to create a nice afternoon for him.
Step outside your own thoughts and feelings about your boy’s behaviour for the moment, and try to put yourself in his shoes:
Could he be feeling anxious because he doesn’t understand that this goodbye is not final and that he will see his friend again? If this is the case what might he need to hear to help him to manage his anxiety?
Could he be feeling overstimulated, and finding it difficult to cope with everything that is going on? If so, what would be the best way to help him cope with everything that is going on?
Try to hang in there - by approaching it from their perspective it can make it easier to understand what the issue is.
TIP 3: Is your messaging on point?
Consider what messages you send your children through your own comments and behaviour. Children are like sponges, absorbing what they see and hear. What you say and do helps shape their understanding of the world. They start to understand how relationships work by watching you with your partner and your parents. They start to learn about how to relate to their looks, to others, and to their abilities based on what you focus on. They develop attitudes like yours simply because that’s what they’ve been exposed to.
For example, watching your children start to explore the world on their own can sometimes be anxiety-provoking. Understandably, you may want to protect them from harm, but sometimes your anxiety can ‘leak out’. If you become overly anxious as your children start to explore, you may inadvertently send them the message that the world is a dangerous place or that they’re not capable.
TIP 4: Help your children organise their feelings
Big feelings can be confusing and distressing for adults, let alone little ones. Our children need help to make sense of big feelings and learn how to respond to them appropriately.
Many of the coping strategies we use as adults are learned when we are very young, so help your children organise their feelings by helping to label them and to use helpful coping strategies. This helps them grow into healthy adults.
So, if your child is scared of doing News at school, you can help by naming anxiety and its symptoms (e.g. butterflies in the tummy), then focus on some practical strategies including:
Teaching them some mindfulness techniques and talking about different situations they can use them in,
Normalise these feelings, and if you’ve experienced the same thing share your experiences
Help them gradually approach doing News in a less scary manner, for example start out doing News in front of a group of toys, then in front of the family, all the time reinforcing gains made.
TIP 5: Conflict happens…it’s what you do with it that matters
No one can be completely attuned to another person all the time. Sometimes we misinterpret our children’s behaviour or, in the haze of sleep deprivation and busy schedules we might get irritated and snap our children. Not only are these ‘slip ups’ to be expected, they are important.
These slip ups give us an opportunity to teach our children how to repair relationships when something goes wrong – but we need to make the first move. So if you don’t quite know where to start, think about how you would like someone to approach you if they’ve snapped at you.
REFERENCES
[1] Sroufe, L.A. (2005) Attachment and development: A prospective, longitudinal study from birth to adulthood, Attachment & Human Development, 7, 349-367, DOI: 10.1080/14616730500365928
How to build better relationships
There’s always room for improvement when it comes to successful and loving connections with your partner or spouse. Read on to see our 4 top tips for building better romantic relationships.
4 tips to build better relationships
What does it take to live a healthier and happier life? It turns out, surprisingly, that it’s positive relationships that are central to health and wellbeing - particularly during challenging times. [1] Healthy relationships (of all sorts) benefit us not only through influencing our health choices but also by buffering against times of stress through social support. [2][3][4][5] But in our stressful modern-day lives, maintaining face-to-face relationships can be a challenge. Today we’re focusing on romantic relationships, as while these are important we sometimes treat them as an afterthought. Read on for our 4 tips to build a better relationship with your partner.
TIP 1: Be present, not just physically there
Does this scene sound familiar? Couples out for dinner or brunching on the weekend, sitting together yet not connecting. They may be Instagramming photos of their food, messaging friends, or simply just distracted, and there’s little conversation happening. Sure, they’re physically there, but are they actually present?
Yes, life gets busy, and the temptation can be to 'get ahead' by checking devices, mentally rehearsing the mental To Do list, or multitasking. The problem is that when we're distracted we miss the opportunity to connect with our loved ones. And it shows – just as when you can tell if your partner has tuned out of your conversation, so too your partner can tell the same of you.
So, choose a time – be it breakfast on the weekend, half an hour at the end of each day - to really be present. And, wherever you are, be there wholeheartedly. Turn off your devices, keep your attention fully on your partner, and try to live in the moment.
TIP 2: Share
It's easy to fall into defined roles in romantic relationships – the Talker versus the Listener, the Giver versus the Taker. Relationships can end up quite one-sided. Sure, it may seemingly work, however the benefits of good relationship can’t be gained from sitting on the sidelines.
Research has shown that personal self-disclosure is important for maintaining good relationships [1]. So that means not just being a good listener but being willing to be listened to as well, and being okay to take when you generally feel more comfortable giving. Share the good, the bad and the ugly with your partner.
TIP 3: Invest
Modern life can be busy and stressful, filled with deadlines to meet, appointments to attend, family and friends to keep in touch with, household chores to take care of, and so on. Along the line, relationships can fall by the wayside as our attention gets diverted to things that are more immediate and pressing. Amongst all of this busy scheduling and putting out of fires, we seem to think our relationships will just tick along without us having to actively work at it!
However, let’s let in a healthy dose of realism. When have things just ticked along without any effort on our part? Our productivity, our health, and our wellbeing all require work, so why would relationships be any different? So, be deliberate in investing your time and effort when it comes to your romantic relationship. Make phone calls or send a quick message to show your partner that you care. Plan dates. Be available. Follow up on conversations. Recognise that what you’re doing will be worth the effort.
TIP 4: Play
Building better relationships for better health is serious business, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be too serious. If you want to build a better relationship, then start by being fun to be around. Get out of your comfort zone and try new things, take up a hobby.
Play time can also help you to destress and feel more relaxed and, in turn, less reactive when it comes to interacting with your partner. So, schedule some leisure time into your week, where your only aim is to rest, relax and have some fun. Your relationship will thank you for it.
With these four easy tips you can get on the path to a better relationship this week. If you find there's conflict and tension in your relationships why not check out our Resource Library Tip Sheet on How to get unstuck from conflict in relationships? Written by our clinical psychologist Annie Malcolm, here’s a sneak peek below, and you can sign up for it (and access to all of our other Tip Sheets on wellbeing, mental health, and performance in our Resource Library).
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REFERENCES
[1] Simon, R. (2002). Revisiting the Relationships among Gender, Marital Status, and Mental Health. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 1065-1096
[2] Holt-Lunstad, J., Birmingham, W. & Jones, B.Q. (2008). Is there Something Unique about Marriage? The Relative Impact of Marital Status, Relationship Quality, and Network Social Support on Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mental Health. Annals of Behavioural Medicine, 35, 239-244.
[3] Braithwaite, S., Delevi, R, Finchanm, F. (2010). Romantic relationships and the physical and mental health of college students. Personal Relationships, 17, 1–12.
[4] Overbeek, G, Stattin, H. (2007). Parent-Child relationships, partner relationships and emotional adjustment: a birth to maturity prospective study. Developmental Psychology, 43, 429-437
[5] Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B., Layton, J.B. (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A meta-analytic review Published: July 27, (2010). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
[6] Jackson, T., Soderlind, A. & Weiss, K. E. (2000). Personality traits and quality of relationships as predictors of future loneliness among American college students. Social Behavior and Personality: An international journal, 28, 463-470.
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