How To Parent More Effectively And Avoid Conflict

As teachers, we've been a part of struggles as parents work to improve their parenting skills, especially when it comes to parenting teenagers, as well as sometimes working through the difficult balance of effective parenting and discipline. Better parenting is not always easy and there are always countless articles on better parenting to offer advice. For us, we've been in the middle of parent-child relationships in the classroom and this doesn't only affect student performance in the classroom, but in other areas of their lives. We've seen first-hand how relationships between parents and children work or don't work. Even when parents have the best of intentions, the results are sometimes not good. It is a great place to start. You want to be a better parent, so how to you achieve the goal of better parenting? We've chosen the top five tips that we feel will help parents be more proactive in dealing with problems that may arise with their children. We believe that by following these tips, you can eliminate or reduce conflict with your children. Top Five Tips To Proactively Handle Conflict With Your Kids: 1. Better Parenting: Be a better you. Show by example how to be the person you want your children to grow up to be. This will avoid any confusion because you are modeling good behavior for them and avoiding any conflicts that may arise from contradictions. For example, you can't tell your kids not to smoke but smoke yourself because you'll be seen as being hypocritical. 2. Assign chores: Such a lovely old-fashioned word for something our children need so badly. Studies have shown that it's a big determinate of how students will succeed in life. That's right. Kids who do chores tend to do better in life than kids who don't. It's no wonder. So when your kids complain that you're being mean, you can tell them that's not your intention, but being a better parent is. Self-esteem comes from doing. You can avoid the conflict of getting your kids to do work around the house when they don't want to, if they know it's expected of them. We often see kids getting rewarded for doing little to nothing. Kids know when they've done something worthwhile versus when they don't. And for them to have self esteem, they need to feel that their work is valued. Assign chores for them to do around the house. Make sure they do it. If they don't, have meaningful consequences. For instance, if they love tv, then no tv for a day or two. 3. Help your child keep track of events and homework in their agenda's: Children in junior high and in high school should rely on an agenda to keep track of important events and homework and assignments. Most schools give one out to children at the start of the year. If your child's school doesn't, then get one. It's key in being better organized and organization plays a key role in better achievement. This way you can avoid the conflict of missed homework or incomplete assignments and any arguments that may usually stem from this issue. 4. Help your child organize their binders: Poor organization really negatively affects student performance and thus cause conflict at school and/or at home. When children are little, most of their work remains in the classroom, so the teacher really helps with organization. Still, they should have a calendar, pencil case and general notebook. When they get to high school, lack of organization can become a serious block to getting good grades. This seems to affect boys mostly, although of course, it also happens with girls. Better parenting tips would be incomplete if we did not stress the importance of helping to keep your child organized. Your child should have a 2 inch binder for EACH subject, never one for all four or eight subjects. Also, everything that goes into a binder should have a place. Everything needs to be hole-punched. Everything. Each binder should have six separate dividers broken down this way as part of our better parenting tips: nn

n
• Notes n
• Homework n
• Assignments n
• ISUs (Projects which are worth a great percentage of the term, usually in the area of 5-10%, so they are weighted more than a general assignment) n
• Tests/Quizzes n
• An assessment tracker page (simply a mark tracker page for each mark received and the weight)-great as an incentive and also to keep to make sure the student's records match the teacher's. n

5. Tell your children you love them: You can never tell them enough. They make complain about it, but kids need to feel their parents love them and it shows in everything they do and in every way they behave in the world. Sometimes kids will not make bad decisions because it will hurt their parents. And they know it will hurt their parents since their parents love them so much. So, if they're running around with the wrong crowd, they begin to detach from that crowd once they know how loved they are and how much continuing this will cause their parents pain. Encourage your children to start a jou al. We've provided some great jou al topics that we've done with our students and have seen many positive results. You might also want to share some motivational quotes to inspire them to write their feelings down on paper. nn