“I Can’t” “I Won’t” “I hate it!” – it’s hard to hear our children being negative about life. But once we understand why they feel so critical of the world around them we can begin to work on bringing back the joy.

Here is a sample of some of our easy and effective tools for solving this issue

This works really well:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ENCOURAGEMENT:

• If your child has a negative attitude, try to encourage and praise him on what he is doing well. Research shows that 80% of parents’ interaction with their children is based around negative comments and criticism, both of which are often done so unconsciously.
• However, keep in mind that praise has to be descriptive. Instead of praising them with general words such as ‘good boy’, try and describe something specific that he or she has done, or show interest in your child’s  achievement by asking questions about he or she accomplished the particular task.
• Also, it is much better to praise the effort than praising the person. For eg. “You’ve done well, you must have put a lot of effort in to this” is much better than “You’ve done well, you’re really clever”.

Here is another suggestion:

ACTIVE LISTENING

• Encourage your child talk to you about what’s on his or her mind.
• As he or she begins to open up, make sure that you are truly listening to what is being said. Then reflect your interest back to your child by echoing what he or she is saying.
• Resist the urge to impose your own agenda, including the desire to make things better. Right now, it is more important that he or she simply feels heard.
• You can also talk about something difficult that happened to you today as an opener. And then when your child responds with his or her own story, simply repeat or say “it sounds like a difficult time for you.”

These are just a few examples of our Best of Parenting Tools. You can find more ideas and solutions to typical parenting challenges in our book ‘Kids Don’t Come With a Manual – The Essential Guide to a Happy Family Life‘.