Don’t you sometimes wish parenting came along a manual or a book full of parenting tips to help us get along? The truth is that parenting is something which we learn along the way. It is something that we continually need to learn, especially as we adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of life around us.
Take heart that all of us as parents are journeying through all these together. We have gathered seven areas of parenting that we’ve found useful and here they are as a round up of parenting tips and reminders for the 21st century.
Seven Parenting Tips for the Modern Age
1. Digital Parenting is a Must
Our children are growing up as digital natives. Do we know what their online activities are? How can we educate our children about the potential dangers online and teach them to be good digital citizens?
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We have advice just for you to talk to children about online harms. The first thing to do is to converse with your child calmly, with a non-judgemental tone and keep the discussion open.
If you need some assistance on getting the journey started, try a brain defence class by SG Families and read about it here. It will get your child to be on their guard when engaging online. To give you more confidence in being a vigilant parent, we have 5 tips for you to ensure healthy device usage in your child.
2. Help Your Child Develop Resilience
There will be many challenges to overcome in life and it is necessary to develop resilience and grit.
How do we encourage the growth mindset in our children? Can we encourage a can-do mindset?
What do we do when they get frustrated easily? We should work on their frustration tolerance skills and encourage them to practise grit. Chipping away the frustration slowly through processing and normalising mistakes can help a child.
Learn from film-maker Stefen Chow on his resilience building tips as a parent. Let’s also practise as a family on being optimistic to encourage resilience.
3. Building Family Unity
One thing we can do as parents is also to build family unity. Especially in times of need, the family is important in supporting one another whether it be a crisis or another season in life. Family support is critical as close familial ties help us all to function better as human beings.
Apart from spending time together, how about creating a family mission statement?
Facing plenty of sibling rivalry recently, we have ways for you to encourage siblings to get along.
4. Raise Compassionate Children by Encouraging Kindness and Inclusivity
Kindness is always needful, sometimes in the cruel reality of human nature.
In today’s “I” society, let’s continue to encourage our children to be compassionate, to learn to give more and receive less. After all, many of us live in excesses and own things we do not need while there are those who lack basic provisions.
We can take a leaf out of Ames Chen, whose Invisible People series encourages one to look beyond our usual circle of people.
5. Do lots of Outdoor Play
There are many benefits to playing outdoors. Keeping them outdoors boosts their immunity!
Where to go? We have some suggestions on the best outdoor playgrounds here.
There are also 120 outdoor activities your family can enjoy together. Aside from getting Vitamin D, there is plenty of bonding time to forge stronger family ties!
6. Learn to Live with Less
Parenting tip number 6 is learning to live with less. This is challenging in modern day society as we are swamped by marketing messages with influencers peddling the next best gadget on our social feeds. We can learn to live with less by being mindful of what we consume – not just materially but digitally. Next, we can model this and teach our children to live with less.
One way to live with less is also to give more. There are five ways to encourage our children to give more and receive less.
7. Build a Healthy Body Image
The final tip is to build a healthy body image, not just that of ours, but our child’s.
Body neutrality embraces our body for its entirety, caring for it through health and fitness goals, eating well and appreciating what our bodies are made to do.
We spend too much time critiquing the ways we look though that aspect is merely skin deep. We should look past our physical appearances, focus much more on health and a general well-being that’s mental and spiritual.
Let us be more confident in the way we are rather than fixate on things that are transient and unreal.
Useful Parenting Tips and Reminders for Our Times
Our generation of children can be resilient, healthy, digitally-savvy, kind, giving and everything that we encourage them to be. Getting through a pandemic is no mean feat and we have done it as families. Let’s build on that and strive to be great parents for the 22nd century.
For more parenting tips, visit our page dedicated to all things parenting.
