How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children

The first thing to realize when it comes to raising emotionally healthy children, is that it’s okay to admit when you just don’t know how to handle all the ages, stages and issues during your child's emotional development throughout the years. We don’t exactly get a parenting encyclopedia that provides us with all the answers to every parenting situation, and every stage during childhood development that come with so many challenges and lessons to be learned. It can do you and your child a lot of good to turn to books and information about each development stage in your child’s life in order to gain greater knowledge of your child’s behavior, struggles, and developmental needs that will help them and you, while raising children to achieve an emotionally healthy well-being.

Here are a few things I have learned along the way while dealing with my own struggles parenting children, and while working with emotional development as a therapist. Many things change with each child and through different childhood stages, but these steps seem to be a consistent foundation for emotionally healthy children.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. CONSIDER HOW YOU'RE MOLDING YOUR CHILD
   How do you choose to sculpt your child? When it comes to raising children, take time to evaluate the parenting role models that you had while growing up. Most of the basic knowledge that we have in parenting children is what we learn from those who had their hand in raising us. Determine what values lead to your own emotional well-being in life and what extremes may have lead to emotional problems for you. Also consider how extremes may affect the overall emotional well-being during their childhood development. If you’ve tried something for awhile and have found that it brings on more problems, it may be time to admit that this may not be an emotionally healthy approach and seek to find yet another approach to try. Raising children is definitely an ongoing stream of learning as well as teaching, and no one way is going to produce the same results with each individual child. Sometimes we have to admit that while we are trying to mold our child, that our child is also molding us as parents!

2. PROVIDE POSTIVE DISCIPLINE AND STRUCTURE
   Part of having emotionally healthy children comes from teaching self-control and cooperation. Rules are made to help organize our lives, establish stability, promote safety, and increase performance which produces healthy emotional development in children. Therefore, rules should be a positive thing. Children need to have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and what benefit the rules provide to everyone when these rules are formed. If a child learns about a rule only after breaking it, then they become resentful and disappointed when they get corrected for something they were not aware of. Be sure that rules and expectations fit the age and abilities of each child throughout the course of their childhood development.

3. PROVIDE GOOD REWARDS FOR GOOD ACTIONS
   I have heard controversy over whether offering a child a reward for good behavior is good or if it is merely bribery. Bribery is an attempt to give someone something good while asking them to perform negative or harmful deeds. But, if you are offering an incentive for a child to earn something good through positive behavior and accomplishing tasks, then essentially, it is no different than earning a paycheck for going to work. This is the reward for performing responsible tasks...the carrot at the end of a stick method. They are learning to earn what they are given through positive behavior that results in a positive outcome. This positive behavior = positive rewards is obviously good for emotional development that creates a positive and realistic perception of how things work that will be carried on through out their lives.
   
   Be very careful that you do not fall into the cycle of providing a reward for negative behaviors. I have often seen parents give in to their child's negative behaviors by providing them a reward just to calm them down or because they just don't want to deal with the difficult situation. Of course, what a child learns from this is that negative behavior = positive rewards. Since life doesn't necessarily work out well in that manner, this is not really a good way to develop emotionally healthy children.

4. USE CAUTION WITH PUNISHMENTS
   Punishments through excessive yelling, threats, or physical strikes teaches a child how to respond to a situation when they are displeased that can lead to emotionally unhealthy perceptions and responses about situations, as they take what they have learned from the angry responses they have seen and apply it to their own lives. Angry responses do not teach our children how to positively solve problems that arise during their childhood development and does not help them to be emotionally healthy children. Remember that how we respond to our children or to situations in our lives sets the example of what our children will learn for dealing with their situations.
   
   When parenting children it's up to us to look at each difficulty as an opportunity to learn new techniques and to communicate more with our children about how to problem solve in order to create positive outcomes. Instead of correcting a child by only enforcing what not to do, be sure that you give them new ideas for handling the situation in order to create a more positive result. The goal of discipline in emotionally healthy children is to provide them with skills for making good decisions and to teach them how to be responsible for their own choices and behaviors as well as for the consequences that follow.

5. SHOW THEM R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
   If you want your child to be respectful, then start by having respect for your child. Having respect for your child’s abilities, interests, and privacy within proper limits of course, is a great way to raise emotionally healthy children. Take time to find out who they are as an individual and how to incorporate that into the way you interact with them. As adults, and especially while parenting children, we don’t like it when others judge us harshly. A child is no different; and judgments in their style, likes and beliefs can harm their esteem and create a jaded view of themselves as well as others during their emotional development. It’s a simple concept; being respectful of others will gain you respect in return.
   
   It is very important during childhood development for a chidl to learn healthy boundaries, and again, we set the perfect example of healthy boundaries through our own actions and interactions. Without healthy boundaries children will have problems in relationships, school, jobs, and life, which may result in addictive behaviors or troubled patterns. When a child doesn’t learn about respectful boundaries for themselves as well as for others, they tend to grow up with a lack of ownership of their own actions, reactions and for their position in life. This obviously does not lead to emotionally healthy children.

6. LEARN MORE
   I consider myself very lucky to be parenting children in a time when so much information is available to us to help us with raising emotionally healthy children. Being willing to seek out parenting information for every stage and situation in a child’s life has made things much easier on me as a parent. Never underestimate the power that comes from breaking out of what you once knew, to how much you can learn, grow and improve in every aspect of your and your child during their emotional development.

Tips & Warnings

• Never give up on your child. They need us in more ways than some realize. If we struggle with them, obviously we have more to learn ourselves!
• Children need responsibilities, but they also need to just enjoy being children. Find a balance between these two spectrums.
• Consider if you're teaching your child to be an independently strong and emotionally healthy person or to be a submissive follower.
• Never underestimate the power of your influence. Children pick up way more from us than we realize.

Resources

• KidsGrowth.com
• Education.com – Child Stages
• Child Development & Parenting Information
• CDC - Child Development
• Improving parent/teen relationship

[sallyemaycreate]

on 9/24/2009 Excellent, solid advice ant tips. Well done... 5*

[sallyemaycreate]

on 9/24/2009 Excellent, solid advice ant tips. Well done... 5*

[botticelli728]

on 6/14/2009 Excellent article. A five.

[FrazzledNanny]

on 6/11/2009 Great tips on raising emotionally healthy children. Love goes a long way when raising children. 5*

[chava812]

on 4/27/2009 Thanks for posting a clear-cut definition on the difference between a bribe and a reward - mistaking one for the other can be very damaging, both emotionally to the child and legally in court.