By Usman Akram | Purpose Fairy
To build a strong bond with your children is the key to happiness in a family, just like in any other relationship you may be involved in.
Building a Strong Bond With Your Children
The lack of a strong bond with your children can have different consequences on the ones involved such as, the kids suffer because of an ignorant parenting style which later in life turns your kids to grown children who ignore their parents.
Thus you as parents should try to develop a strong bond with your children from an early age.
10 Ways to Build a Strong Bond With Your Children
There are many ways you can build a strong bond with your children and today I’m going to share 10 of them. Here we go:
1. Have a Healthy Relationship With Your Spouse
Parenting your children doesn’t start with children themselves. It starts by looking at the environment you are providing them. This means you need to ensure a healthy relationship with your spouse as it would have a direct impact on your children.
For example, if your partner and you get into harsh arguments very often and the debate gets heated very often, your children may get sidelined. A good way to control this is to handle your disagreements in private and give a positive home atmosphere to your children. It’d bring them an environment they don’t feel insecure in and thus would be open in their behavior.
2. Set a Physically Healthy Routine for Them
Before you make efforts to have more involvement with your children, you as parents should make sure they are mentally prepared for it and are healthy generally.
Good health not only has a good impact on your kid’s physical appearance but also prepares them mentally. So you as parents should make sure your children have some level of physical activity in their daily routine.
There are studies that have proved that exercise helps your kids from preventing depression. Also, research has proved that exercising makes children happier. The physical activity may seem weird ion this regard but it has a huge indirect relation with how good your kids engage with their parents at home.
3. Be An Example for Them
Your kids have no exposure to the real world at this stage and totally look up to you to learn or understand things. You cannot trick your kids in any way. No matter what you want those to learn or be like, you’d have to practically show them by being an example.
For example, if you want them to stop lying, you shouldn’t ever lie by yourself. Similarly, if you want your kids to have a strong bond with you when at home, you should also express the same behavior with your spouse in front of the kids. Your children won’t be interested to talk to you naturally if they don’t find you keenly interested in talking to them.
So don’t just interact because you want them to be interactive in nature, pay genuine attention to what they have to share.
4. Be Interactive Toward Your Children
The other most important thing is to interact with your children as much as you can and in any form. Interaction lessens the communication gap between the parents and children and in turn, it helps to strengthen the relationship.
For example what happens typically is even if the parent is sitting right next to the child, he’d be busy with his laptop and the child would be playing video games.
No interaction at all. How it should’ve been is that you as a parent should initiate a short conversation inquiring about his day at school or something else. This short talk can make a huge contribution to strengthen your relationship.
5. Create Quality Time with Them
Your aim to have a strong bond with your children more will only be fulfilled when you get close to them. And you can get close to them by making them feel special. For example, your children know that your work means something to you and you take your office seriously.
Still, if they ask for something in the morning to bring when coming back from office and you remember it, it’d definitely make them feel good. Similarly, when you take out time especially to be with your kid on his school football match, it’d mean something to him. Or it can be something as small as putting down a book you were reading just to listen to their story of what happened in school more attentively.
These little acts make your children understand the worth they have in your life.
6. Allow Them to Have Their Space
Giving space to your child is just as important as being with your child for plenty of the day time. You have to be engaged and interactive making sure you don’t leave your child lonely.
However, at the same time, you have to ensure it’s not happening at the cost of their private time. No matter how old your child is (except the toddler years) you should always keep a limit to the time you spend with him. It enhances their creativity, their imaginative power and their ability to think and analyze.
What you need to do is to balance the right ratio between how much time your child spends indirect interaction with you, being partially active around you and being totally alone doing his own activities. Otherwise, your intention to have a strong bond with them would only feel like a burden to them.
