8 minutes
It is important to know that respect is built with more respect. If you want to cultivate this value in your children, your starting point is by example.
To make your children respect you, the essential thing is that they grow up with that example. Recognition of differences and understanding are values that sustain balance and family harmony. Today’s experience confirms that it is easier to approach happiness if it is based on understanding. Size, strength or age do not prevail over love that is born and grows with respect.
So how can you instill respect in your children? What can you do to solve the conflictive situations of the day to day? There are several answers to these questions. So here are 10 helpful tips.
10 tips for your children to respect you
These tips have a common factor; comprehension. Being parents requires setting limits, and these must be opposed to obtuse impositions or just because. It is preferable to agree and be firm in accepting the rules. Without violence and without resorting to force, because the virtue of reason is not in having it but in sharing it.
1. Set limits
It is known that if the limits are lax, your children will not know for sure when to stop, how far they can go, what they can or cannot do. It is the responsibility of the parents to establish them clearly, delimit them and, above all, take the respective actions so that they are fulfilled.
But these work better if, instead of being deaf and insurmountable walls, they become zones of exchange. Authority is not imposition, but sustained and continually argued reasons. It is true, it is easier to say no, but in the long run it will not give the best results in the face of the explanation and the satisfaction of the arguments.
It is the longest and most demanding route, but there is no doubt that words help shape emotions. What can be expressed is easier to understand and assimilate. To make your children respect you, set reasoned limits and make consensus and agreements to comply with the family.
2. Rather than question, inquire
Perhaps not enough thought has been given to the questioning and vigilant power of interrogations. The questions stir and seek to bring to light what is suddenly not ready to emerge.
Most of the time, it happens when your children go through important and powerful experiences. First day of school, at the sports academy, at a long-awaited celebration, and so on.
The emotion translates into unfolding one question after another, but the answer, or rather the silence of your children, does not satisfy your desires. It is natural for this to happen. Emotions don’t translate into words that easily.
3. When they are ready, they will respond
Responding is difficult, even for you who have gained communicational competence. It is the same for your children, who are learning to transform their feelings into communicable concepts.
Putting into words what happens inside you and in others is a daily exercise. For this reason, allow the words that express what your children have felt without pressure to gradually take shape within themselves and come out naturally. Of course, you must be prepared to listen.
4. Don’t be too quick to answer
Do they ask you a lot of questions? Yes, but you don’t have to answer everything. Questions are mechanisms of exploration and sometimes say more when left unanswered. Sometimes the silence is more eloquent and cannot be fully translated into words.
Usually, If circumstances permit, take your time to respond. This is so that reflection and meditated silence are more cherished values than the answer that cancels the question.
On the other hand, it is believed that the questioner exercises authority. Thus, it seems that when your children ask, they are beginning to make use of that resource. Take your time, postpone the answer and locate it at another time. Don’t dismiss it; On the contrary, to make your children respect you, choose carefully and with preparation the topics to build solid truths with them.
5. Your children are masters of their body
You got used to helping them in everything and, suddenly, they are setting limits themselves. One day they decide to bathe alone. It is very likely that the next bath will be assisted again, but you should already know that they are giving signs of autonomy in something very important and decisive.
Help them and accompany them. Create the conditions so that these types of decisions become more frequent and natural within the rhythm of everyday life. They are growing up and, therefore, they are building an intimate relationship with their body, at home and with society.
Remember, you were part of their body, but growing up they are like shedding their skin. Try to be attentive to these processes to accompany and assist them when necessary, without suffocation or overprotection.
6. Respect their choices
Your children are autonomous; It is the first lesson you must learn. Therefore, they make decisions. You have been teaching them little by little that, from the moment you sense that this way they become bigger and more responsible.
The consequence of this autonomy is that they choose and do not always choose what you would have preferred. It happens in clothing, when choosing dishes in the restaurant, on the grounds of school supplies, when going to the movies, and so on.
Anyway, life offers you countless opportunities so that the choice your children make has a specific weight and their way of being and doing corresponds.
7. Give them time
Faced with anguish, time is paralyzed. Instead, joy makes time fly. Your children will be more likely to express their emotions if they are happy. On the contrary, if things are not going well, they will prefer to take a space.
With pounding questions you will not get timely answers. So, go along and be patient; at the same time you are teaching by example the gift of patience.
8. Listen to them carefully
To make your children respect you, listen to them and, above all, look them in the eye. Pay attention to them and interact in tune with their approaches. Indifference, looking the other way, turning a blind eye or being always absorbed in your own affairs, creates a harmful wall.
Fluent and attentive communication builds bonds. Do not forget that when it comes to brittle bridges, as in adolescence, this will help you to make the way back and forth passable.
9. Don’t lie to them
Authority suffers when your children discover that you have lied to them. While there are issues you prefer not to address, silences like lies have short legs.
Seek professional help if you feel that the matter overwhelms you, as in the case of very sensitive family losses or those that concern financial stability. Talking about this in the appropriate terms is the ideal way to maintain the family unit. and to earn respect based on trust.
And here the golden advice; the example is the school of respect and authority. Nothing like showing that you do what you preach; that your children will see and most likely will replicate it.
Be kind to your neighbors and the people who assist you in day-to-day affairs; express your thanks aloud. Reason with the people who frequent you, instead of engaging in sterile discussions. All this will be a mirror for your children and it will be useful when they have to face life.
What should you remember?
Respect is not achieved with the imposition of rules through fear and coercion. Making your children respect you means understanding that parenting is a social construction and the result of a fruitful interaction.
Your children need this courage to move freely within established social and cultural limits. In addition, it is decisive for them to have stability and confidence. In short, you must be the welcoming hands, the protective embrace, the listening ears and the wise words, especially when difficult times come.
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