Habitually Responding in Helpful Ways to Parenting Situations

You are bombarded with making many parenting decisions every day. From deciding what to serve for dinner to responding to your children when they don’t want to eat what you’ve made, you’re continually assessing situations and making choices.

Primarily these are little responses, small decisions that you make multiple times each day. How much does any single response matter? Generally not much, but it’s the accumulation of all these little responses that create your family culture.

Assessing Your Current Habits

Step back for a moment and pretend you are an invisible stranger observing your family. What do you see? Where is the most tension? Do you hear a lot of yelling? What happens when the children misbehave? How do disagreements between children get resolved?

When you look at your current family environment, what do you see is working well? If you could change a couple things, what would they be?

The current family environment you are witnessing is the result of your current parenting habits. It’s the little things you do daily without much thought that have created your family atmosphere. Making changes will involve establishing new habits.

Creating Habits for Challenging Situations

When you go to Starbucks, you are expecting a pleasant experience in return for paying a premium price for their coffee. Have you ever noticed that their employees maintain their friendly, cheerful attitude even when it’s hectic? How do they do this?

(read the rest of the article at Priceless Parenting)