Parents talk about positive approaches to guiding children’s behaviour. Pausing to take a breath to respond, rather than reacting to children’s behaviour.
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Transcript
When there is a difficult moment take a pause. Connect before you correct. Going from your head to your heart, taking a deep breath, responding but not reacting.
So simple, but so effective.
Stopping and managing my emotions before I react to what the children are doing.
So, the pause, connect, and then having time to think of a new solution with the child.
Now I'm coming to a situation and I'm assessing it and I'm thinking about, well how am I feeling at this moment? Do I really have the emotional ability to deal with this in the way that I need to? How are they going? Are they particularly tired, or are they really hungry?
Something as tiny as you know, learning just to step back and just you know take breath and back off, can just change how you totally deal with that situation in the next moment.
Deep breath okay it's not the end of the world if we're at school 10 minutes late, if someone's forgotten a sock. It's probably better just to make sure that things are calm and easy, rather than yeah, the way they're supposed to be.
If you don't have time to stop and think before you react, you can go from what could be just a slower calmer five-minute delay to a complete breakdown of an hour and everyone's just yeah inconsolable.
When there's a build-up or a frustration and irritation that might cause me to explode, I'm more aware now. So, I'm able to take a few deep breaths and use my reasoning minds rather than having an emotional reaction.
Just a simple, tiny little thing that you can change every day, can make a massive difference in their behaviour and ultimately that's what we want. We don't want to be yelling at our kids.
You can find out more information about positive approaches to guiding behaviour on the Parenting SA website.