Дидактический материал по теме "How to Raise Happy Children"

How to Raise Happy Children

1. Keep Yourself Happy

According to extensive research, there is a substantial link between parents’ mood and their children’s. Children have the ability to absorb a lot of things from their parents, including moods. By attending to your own emotional well-being, you ensure that your child’s emotions remain positive.

2. Cultivate Healthy Lifestyle

It is important for every human being to enjoy sleep, exercise and a healthy diet, and for happy children, it is more important. Toddlers are exercisers by nature and thus you should give the child ample time and space to play and remain active. Also, ensure you pay attention to your child’s need for schedules. While some kids enjoy any random schedules, most kids prefer a set schedule which allows them to know what is coming next.

3. Praise Your Children Often

While you cannot always praise your child for everything, you need to praise them for the right stuff. Do not make them feel as though they have to accomplish something to gain your approval. The goal of parenting is to help your child to foster a growth mind-set. You should make the child believe achievement is attained when one works hard and through practice. Happy children who have cultivated a growth mind-set have the ability to do better in life and are likely to enjoy life as they are not too worried about what others will think.

4. Keep Close Connections with Your Children

It is very important to make your child feel connected to both the parents and other family members. A connected childhood fosters happiness in the child’s life. Connectedness is the feeling of being loved, understood, acknowledged and wanted. When these needs are met, your child will be free from emotional distress, risky behaviour and suicidal thoughts. Offer your child love unconditionally and ensure they feel it and they are happy. You can increase your connection by holding the child as much as possible, responding to cries with empathy, reading aloud to them, laughing together, etc.

5. Cultivate the Right Attitude towards Success and Failure

If you really want to build your child’s self-esteem, try to compliment them less and focus more on offering opportunities that allow them to learn new skills. Mastery, not praise, is the right foundation to build your child’s self-esteem. In the process of whether they fail or succeed in an activity, they can master the skill, learn to practise and cultivate the right attitude towards failure and success.

6. Let the Child Feel Needed

The happiness of your children and even yourself as an individual depends mostly on the feeling of being needed. Without the feeling, humans fear that they may be excluded and forgotten. Human beings have an innate need of belonging and feeling needed. Make your children feel a part of the family and make them know that they play a big role in the family from an early age. Give them a responsibility that they can be accountable for the house chores and demonstrate the need for them. This gives them a sense of belonging, responsibility and also happiness.

7. Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude

According to studies, happiness is strongly linked to the feeling of gratitude which leads to emotional well-being. Studies have also shown that individuals who keep daily and weekly gratitude journals are more optimistic and make progress towards their goals. While it is unrealistic for a child to keep a journal, it is important for parents to make it a habit each day to teach their kids to be grateful for something that has happened during the day. You need to set time for gratitude sessions and make it a habit for your child.

8. Cultivate an Optimistic Attitude

It is important to teach your children to be optimistic from an early age. This saves you, as the parent, a lot of stress when they become teenagers as they are unlikely to become surly. According to statistics, teenagers who grow up being taught how to look at issues from a positive angle are less likely to fall into depression. Optimism is related to happiness, the more optimistic your kids are, the happier they will be. Besides, optimists are more successful in school, more satisfied in their marriages and less likely to deal with anxiety and depression.

9. Teach Your Children to Be Hardworking

It is important for parents to avoid seeking perfection from their children and to focus more on raising hard-working children. Parents who overemphasize the need for achievements and perfection are more likely to have depressed children instead of happy children. Anxiety and drug abuse are also commonly linked with the need to become perfect. Parents should praise effort instead of achievement. In this way, your child will not be too scared to make mistakes and will be more willing to learn new experiences through making mistakes along the way.

10. Give Children Playtime

Giving your children more time to play is equal to meditation and mindfulness for grownups. Playtime makes it possible for kids to learn and grow. There is really no need to follow when it comes to offering kids playtime. All you need to do is find the ideal time for your kids to enjoy play and be happy.

Think of your childhood and say if:

1) it was happy;

2) you were often praised;

3) you were much read to aloud;

4) you were responsible for some house chores;

5) you remember your first “thank you”;

6) you were praised for achievements or hard work;

7) there was a set of rules in your family;

8) the rules were fair at the time;

9) your opinion on these rules has changed as you have got older;

10) your parents were super protective;

11) your parents always told you what to do;

12) children are harder or easier to raise in today’s world.