Parenting Advice - Find Out What Works Best For You

Before you get completely overwhelmed, take a deep breath and relax. Everyone needs to find the parenting style that works best for them and their children. Even two children in the same family may not respond the same way to the same discipline.

What is Right for You and Your Child

Just as you will shop around for the perfect baby wrap or car seat, you also need to shop around until you find the right parenting advice that fits your family. It is impossible to know when your child is a newborn whether time outs will work for your family.

Books, magazines, television and the internet all are full of advice that you'll need to wade through, along with all the unsolicited advice you may get from well-meaning family members, friends and even complete strangers.

When you are wading through all this advice, there are a few things you can do to help weed out the good from the bad.

Does the advice sound good to your gut instincts? If not, don't use it.

For example, many people follow advice to let their baby cry it out and learn to put themselves to sleep at a very young age. Some babies may learn this quickly with no problems. Others need that time to cuddle and nurse, and putting them alone in a room may make them feel unloved and afraid.

Remember, just because the parenting advice you get may have worked for your best friend, it doesn't mean it suits the personalities in your individual family.

So, keeping in mind that every parent is different and every child is different, here are some general guidelines and tips that will help almost anyone...

Strategies and Tactics

Get to know your kids. Observe how they react to different situations. Learn what makes them feel comfortable and safe, what makes them feel lonely and afraid, and what helps them feel confident. Adapt your parenting methods to what you learn, don't try to make them all fit the same mold.

Find a parenting style that both you and your partner can agree with. Consistency is king in parenting, and if you both come from different directions, your children will soon learn to divide and conquer, no matter what parenting advice you try.

Some parents use a sort of “good cop, bad cop” approach, where one parent is the strict one. This works too, you just need to have one plan, know your role, and try to stick with it.

Adapt as needed. If time outs worked for your older child, but your younger child has screaming fits at the mere thought of a time out, figure out a strategy that he can live with and understand the punishment without it being traumatic.

If you try a strategy and you just can't find it in yourself to keep it up due to your child's reaction, you can stop and try something else.

The crying it out strategy is a great example. If you just can't bear to hear your child crying every night for hours, that's okay. This is not the right advice for your family. Try another tactic and it may work better for you.

Parenting advice comes from all sides. By learning how to pick and choose what to listen to, you will make it easier for your entire family to find a parenting strategy that fits everyone.

Read more about this topic on the following pages:

Parenting Styles - How To Make A Correct Choice
What type of parent do you want to be? The parenting styles we choose are most likely reliant on how our folks raised us. We tend to imitate our own parents, even if we don’t realize it.

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