Practical Guide For a Healthy Parent Child Relationship

There is no doubt that parenting is the most challenging, important, and loving role in the world. The most important relationship to a child is the relationship with their parent or caregiver. This relationship cherishes the physical, psychological, and social development of the child.

A healthy parent child relationship determines the child’s personality, choices that they make in the future life, and overall behavior of the child. Not only that but also it affects the social, physical, mental, and emotional health of the child through their lifetime. 

Children always seek security, love, and affection from their parents. Children learn about the world around them through a healthy child-parent relationship.

Additionally, this is the foundation where a child builds his future relationships. If a parent can build a healthy parent child relationship, that child will bloom beautifully!

Once you finish reading this post, you will get to know all the information relating to the healthy parent and child relationship.

This will be a comprehensive post that covers all the relevant information. Therefore, I have listed the topics I discuss below. Please, feel free to jump straight to the section you want by clicking on the topic.

Let’s get started!

Importance of having a healthy parent-child relationship

Children learn many things from their parents. Mainly the language they speak, the way they talk, how they express emotion, etc. A parent impacts the most basic phase of a child’s life. There is numerous importance of a healthy parent child relationship.

Helps the child exhibit optimistic and confident social behaviors

A healthy parent child relationship helps the child to face society more confidently. If parents are strict regardless of the age of the child, he may not share his things with his parents.

Parenting should balance between being strict and soft. Usually, children depict what they learned from the parents through how he behaves in the classroom, which he speaks to, how he speaks, etc.

Also, they easily develop positive relationships with the people around them as they can establish secure bonds and friendships with peers.

So it is obvious that a healthy relationship with parents leads to optimistic and confident personal development in a child. 

Promotes the child’s mental development

Listening and problem-solving are very important for a child. As much as a parent-child relationship needs to be conversational, interactive, and friendly, it helps for the mental development of the child.

Such friendly dialogue facilitates children to go straight to their parents for everything rather than hiding and lying. Parents are the primary people that help a child to understand what is right or what is wrong.

In a healthy parent child relationship the child becomes more open and shares everything, acknowledges mistakes. This helps to improve the problem-solving skills of the child while promoting good mental development.

Learn essential skills and values

Healthy parental relationships say a lot about how a child behaves and performs in all aspects of life. Love, warmth, care, affection, mutual respect, encouragement, and constant motivation are essential for all children to enhance their confidence and self-esteem.

Parents who criticize their children damage the self-image of the child and heavily affect his mental health. Also, some parents force their wills and ambitions onto their children. They are distancing themselves from their children.

If a child feels that they can turn on to parents at any time, that child will have better social and academic skills. Also, it helps to regulate emotions during difficult times. Friendly daily conversations lead to a child’s emotions.

So this relationship helps to learn essential skills and values that set children on the path for their future success.

Different types of parent-child relationships 

There are different types of parent-child relationships. Below mentioned are three main types that are often seen in society. 

1. Secure relationship

 This is the strongest type of parent-child relationship. Here, a child feels that he can depend on his parents for anything. He knows that his parents will be there whenever he needs support. The secure child usually plays well with other children his age.

Maybe he cries when his parents leave him for a few hours, but he will settle down when another friendly adult comforts him. He is very happy to see his parents when he misses them for a while. This is how normally a child who has a secure parent-child relationship behaves.

2. Avoidant relationships

The avoidant parent-child is not secure. Children who have this kind of relationship with their parents always try not to depend on their parents. Because they won’t get a secure feeling from their parents, so they learn to take care of themselves.

These children may seem too independent. They do not often ask for help from anyone, but they get frustrated easily. They show aggressive behaviors many times due to this. So it may be very difficult to have friends and move with other children of the same age.

Additionally, they don’t complain when the parents leave them as normal children, and they do not greet the parents when they return. These children are not happy to see their parents and try to avoid them.

3. Ambivalent relationships

This is also an insecure parent-child relationship.  Ambivalence means not sure of something completely. In this type of relationship, children identify that sometimes their needs are met, and sometimes not.

They are always seeking that feeling of security and love that they sometimes get. Most often, they are very clingy to their parents. They tend to act younger than they are to grab attention. For example, when a school child wants an adult’s attention, he might use baby talk or act like a baby.

Ambivalent children often cry because they love to be the center of attention. They get upset if people aren’t paying attention to them. Also, they cry for a long time when their parents leave for a few hours.

This type of parent-child relationship will be troublesome to the parents in their day-to-day life.

4. Disorganized Relationships

This type of relationship is not structured and does not follow any common guidelines or regulations. Children who have this type of relationship with their parents do not know what to expect from their parents.

Parents of this relationship act in different ways in the same type of situation. For instance, when their kid hurts the sibling, sometimes parents might intervene and advise the kid, but sometimes they might not do anything but watch it and laugh at the siblings.

This relationship type cannot be identified as a healthy parent-child relationship.

Possible risks and problems of parent-child relationship

The parent-child relationship determines the personality of a child that affects for his lifetime. If the relationship is stressed due to various problems, the child’s personality will be affected too.

Here are a few common problems that are not suitable for a healthy parent child relationship and any parent should avoid:

• Parental factors

This includes family conflicts such as the lack of discipline of parents. Discipline issues such as selfishness, unstable behavior, carelessness, untrustworthiness, violent behavior heavily affect the child. Or the parental control may be too tight for the child.

Overprotection is a risk factor for childhood anxiety that commonly many parents do due to the unconditional love for the child. But it is a risk for a healthy parent child relationship.  Also, marital conflict, divorce, or separation makes a risk to the parent-child relationship. 

The physical and mental illnesses of parents are badly affected for the child.  Additionally, it is necessary to avoid addiction to alcohol as a parent if they hope to have a strong bond with their children.

• Poor communication

Parents should be friendly with their children. They should implant the feeling that their children can turn to their parents whenever they need. This can be done through good communication.

Poor communication between the parent and child can be frustrating to both parties. Commonly, poor communication results when parents believe that their children don’t want to listen to them, and children think that their parents don’t understand them.

This freezes the communication between the two parties, resulting in anger, bitterness, and sorrow which lead to an unhealthy relationship.

• Disrespect

Parents in contemporary society frequently complain that their children act or speak disrespectfully to them.  It is important to remember that respect is mutual and has to be earned. A parent should provide the child with physical, emotional, and social needs.

If parents escape from satisfying these needs, then children begin to disrespect the parents. These children tend to disobey their parents, break the rules, and rely more on others for their needs and desires.

• Child factors

If the child is disabled or having some kind of mental issues, this could badly affect a healthy parent-child relationship. In this type of situation, parents must be very careful and mindful in order to build and maintain a good relationship with your child.

If you try, obviously you can achieve this target as you are the best one who can understand your kid.

How to build a healthy parent child relationship?

A parent has the responsibility to build a healthy parent child relationship. Parents can build a positive parent-child relationship in simple but strong ways.  By following mentioned techniques, it will be easy to build a strong and healthy relationship with the child. 

1. Express your love

This is one of the very easy techniques that can greatly impact the child and one of the best ways to build a healthy parent child relationship. Children like to feel loved and secured. Let them know that their parents love them as they are growing up, no matter their age.

Even after having disagreements and misunderstandings, make them feel that you love them unconditionally. A child must receive gentle, loving touches like hugs and kisses from the parent several times throughout the day.

And parents should make sure they say “I/we love you” in those times. It will make them feel that they are loved and valued by their parents unconditionally.

A simple “I/we love you” can have a huge impact on the relationship with the child. Also, this will lead to healthy emotional development within the child.

2. Have meals together

Parents and children may indeed be busy throughout the day with their day-to-day tasks. But eating at least one meal together is a necessity for a healthy parent child relationship.

I suggest it will be great to have dinner with the family because mealtime is the best time to have conversations and share. It allows bonding time with the child. But be sure to avoid all distractions during mealtime, such as turn the TV off and keep phones away.

This also affects the overall mental health of the child.

3. Spend time together

Playing is so important to a child’s development, both mentally and physically. Through playing, they develop language skills, express emotions, adopt creativity and learn about social skills.

Playing with the child is fun for a parent to and helps to strengthen the relationship with the child. No matter what the game is, it should be based on how much each other enjoys and the parents’ commitment to giving their undivided attention and time.

Therefore, this is also the best way to maintain a healthy parent child relationship. 

4. Set boundaries and rules

Kids must also have limits, rules, and guidelines. Therefore, as the parents, it is very important to express your expectations regarding their behavior and set clear guidelines for them to follow.

If they break the rules or ignore guidelines, there should be age-appropriate consequences. This is very important to maintain a good and unbreakable relationship with your kid.

5. Be available and listen.

Although we have very busy schedules and many other important tasks to finish, it is essential to be available to your kid. Since you are the most important person in your kids’ lives, not being available when they want you would damage your relationship with your kid.

Keep at least 10 minutes per day to talk to your kid, and use this time to listen to your kid and share your thoughts. This will help you immensely to create and maintain a healthy parent-child relationship.

Conclusion

The parent and child bond is one of the strongest and most beautiful bonds anyone can have in their lifetime. It brings the best out of any person. Also, there’s no doubt that being a parent is one of the most challenging roles in the world.

Modern family life can be stressful, and with various pressures on families, it’s not always easy. Balancing your work and personal life with familial and parental duties can be quite tough. Many parents want to raise happy and successful children.

Additionally, the Parent-Child Relationship is very important in the physical, emotional, and social development of the child. Following the above tips and avoiding mentioned mistakes will lead to a healthy parent child relationship. Remember that loving parents raise a loving child!

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