Parenting Tips to Deal with Kids & Teenagers: The Parenting Flow

Dealing with kids and raising them is not a cakewalk. Every child is different and every child needs a different approach and parenting style. Despite our trials with parenting tips on books and websites, parenting tips that suit every child may be impossible. 

Despite what parenting tips we may be aware of, every parent needs guidance and support to raise kids in a good way. Here are some parenting tips from the book “The Parenting Flow”. As you move ahead in this article, you will learn how to deal with kids and teenagers and how to become a good parent. 

Parenting Tips – For parents of kids

Parents often feel that kids are not listening to their words. But they forget that kids are watching them. So, remember that your kids are watching you every time and build their habits without themselves knowing it.

Every kid has their speed. It is not good to label or compare them with other children. Give them time and space to build their skills and keep encouraging them with positive words.

Skin-to-skin touch is the first thing that forms a strong bond between a kid and parent.  It strengthens your bond with your little kid. Your warm touch gives them the confidence that you are always with them. They need your touch, hugs, and kisses. You can develop touch by hugging them, cuddling them, massaging them, patting them to sleep, or simply playing with them using your bare hands.

Quality parenting time is vital with small kids. Be however hectic your routine is, make sure to spend some quality time with your kids. Put all the gadgets away and spend only with your sibling alone!

Encourage conversations of your kids with grandparents. They are the sources of wisdom, experience, and knowledge. The love grandparents shower on kids is the purest!

Let your child fail. Let them learn. Guide them to a certain level. Beyond them let them experiment. But whatever the results are, stay with them and support their efforts and results as well.

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Instil the humane touch in your kid from childhood. Encourage them to spend time with nature. Let them do gardening. Let them marvel at the beauty of stars and the smell of the rain. Focus on their sensual growth and let them appreciate the small things of life to appreciate bigger things later in their life. 

Little kids feel peer pressure though we don’t identify it. Right from their school bag of their friends to the sports their pals win and your kids lose, they compare everything. Beyond a limit, this may be potentially dangerous to your kid emotionally. Thus, keep an eye on their behavior and teach them how to navigate peer pressure.

Family systems and values form lasting impressions on your kids, often their lifetime. Thus, make sure your child grows in a happy, healthy, and positive family atmosphere with solid values and culture.

Cultivate good food habits in your child right from childhood. It is healthy to feed a body the food that lies in its genes. This promotes a healthy and sturdy body as your kid grows up.

Parenting Tips – For Parents of Teenagers

Parenting teenagers is challenging. Given their hormones and age, they think and act with rage and speed. Their age does not impart them the patience to understand why parents are saying what they are saying.

The impression parents make on teenagers is massive. Be it in relationships, habits, or daily practices, set a benchmark for your teenage kid by implementing good things first by yourself.

Spend time close with family during at least one meal. Talk freely, staying away from gadgets or your social media. This will improve communication among family members. It also provides a sense of security to your kid that they can talk to parents for any help.

Parents of teenagers often find it intimidating about their kid’s friends. This is the age where friends can make or break a child’s future. Thus, the worry is natural. Thus, one of the parenting skills is to monitor your kid’s friends, the groups they are interested in, without sounding stalking. Teenagers hate when parents stalk. Thus, this is one of the sensitive yet indispensable parenting skills one should develop.

Make use of your child’s holidays well. Use this time to take them on trips and show them the world. Let them marvel at the size of the world. This will open up their young minds that later can turn into marvelous creations.

Focus on holistic parenting. Encourage your kid towards all aspects of life equally. Education, spiritual, sports, family, society, mental growth, hobbies, etc. Restricting them only to books or only to one field might not let them grow holistically.

Inculcating book reading in kids is one amazing way to build their future. That said, if your kid is not interested in reading books, at first, you may try to encourage them by getting started with their favorite genre. 

For those kids who don’t like reading, TED Talks, motivational movies, EQ books and activities, and related hobbies can also help them think and develop curiosity and open-mindedness. 

Always leave discussions open-ended. For instance, instead of asking “how was your day at school?”, ask your child, “what’s the interesting thing you learnt at school today?” The more you encourage answers, the more you can understand what your teenage child thinks.

Teenager kids tend to compare themselves with others -in terms of beauty, body, hair, growth, skin tone, etc. One of the parenting skills you need to know is to explain them with examples that physical beauty or limitations can nowhere define one person. Show them successful people who created world records despite their physical limitations.

Social media can often impact your child. Any negligence to spend quality time with kids will push them towards fatal attractions on social media. Hence, encourage your child to spend more time socializing in person with family and friends rather than on social media.

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Parenting Quotes – From the book Parenting Flow

• Being a parent is the single most important decision you will ever make in your entire life.

• Your child is in no way an extension of you or your partner. He is a separate entity on its own.

• Every child has a right to own a space where he is loved without any conditions or judgments, irrespective of anything whatsoever!

• Why do we physically distance our kids when they grow older?

• Resist the temptation to impose your opinion or criticize your kid’s perspective, even if you don’t agree to it.

• Just the mere presence of a parent is a great morale booster for a kid. The explanation is beyond logic or science and is only a parent-child connection!

• A happy marriage reflects in happy parenting and happy kids.

• Parenting is not a long break or a sabbatical from enjoying the sweetness of marriage. The couple should ensure that their relationship is sweet like before they turned into parents.

• The experience of parenting – creating and nurturing a life form is more than amazing!

• If you are keen to imbibe any value in your child, do so first in your life.

• When understanding from your child, ask him “why he did” rather than “what he did”.

• In dual parenting, each parent shares equally being in the driver’s seat as well as the co-passenger sitting next to the driver.

• Embrace your child as he is and let him be his own Michaelangelo!

• Meal times are sacred! At least one meal a day should be together with the whole family on the dining table with everyone present without any gadgets.

About the Book Parenting Flow

In this book, the author – Sanket Dharod questions, suggests, and wonders about many areas of parenting. Starting the book with the evolution of life, he covers various areas of parenting in a sequential flow. The book delivers impactful insights for parents who have kids of any age. 

The author suggests keeping kids away from commercialization. In one instance, he questions if the schooling system is pushing kids towards a misnomer called homework. His thoughts like “differential learning” and the usefulness of exams make readers think twice about the education system and the rat race we are in. He also touches on the impact of AI on future education. 

Sure, only a few authors of parenting books might see this far. Dharod suggests a ‘conscious drift’ from the current education is vital for kids. And readers cannot agree more.

In another section – Remote parenting, he explains how to take care of kids while parents are both working. A not to skip section for parents who stay away from kids due to work and hectic life. 

Talking of the new age parents who are postponing their age of turning into parents, he opines evolution is now a choice rather than compulsion. The ‘DINK generation’ as he calls – ‘Double Income No Kids’ – is taking parenting and evolution to another meaning, he believes. He suggests that parenting is beautiful, and if you want to embark on it, do it less but do it beautifully.

The author explains how important it is to choose a school that provides the space needed for your child to grow. This shows how he wishes to guide parents from every minuscule aspect of parenting. 

Right from calling the mother’s womb the ‘cosiest sanitised environment’, sharing quotes on every page and the terms that the author uses gives us a different, fresh, and learning perspective of parenting.

You can find this thoughtful book here: