Do you have an impatient or demanding kid? here’s how to respond
Parenting can be tricky. While we want to ensure that we provide the best of everything to our children, it is also important to be strict at times when we need to teach values and skills to the children. Children can act up at times – when they show tantrums or behave impatiently, it can be due to a lot of underlying problems. Communicating with them in a language that they understand is important for effective parenting. Children sometimes have difficulties in explaining the emotions that they are feeling. That can be the reason for them being demanding or impatient. For a parent, it is important to understand what they are trying to communicate and the emotions that they are trying to communicate to us.
Psychologist Jazmine McCoy explained this and shared a few tips for parents for handling demanding or impatient kids to understand them better.
ALSO READ: Tantrum taming: Practical strategies for parents to effectively deal with toddler meltdowns
We’re now on WhatsApp. Click to join
Narrate what you hear them communicating: Instead of scolding them or feeling frustrated, we should narrate to them the emotions that we can understand from their behaviour. Sometimes a kid may act up because they feel hungry, or sleepy or emotionally disconnected. We should help them understand that we hear them and are doing our best to make them feel better. Assurance will help the kids to know that we are not ignoring their emotions.
Establish a clear boundary: While we should make them feel better, we should also establish boundaries so that they learn to respect them at an early age. If they feel hungry while we are cooking, we can find a common ground to make them as well as ourselves feel better.
Coach them to explain themselves better: This is a process of helping them understand how they can articulate their emotions better and communicate to us in a clearer way. We can coach them to re-do their responses and explain their situation and emotions to us, in a more clarified format.
