As a parent or someone in a parenting role, your influence is essential in your child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship while instilling confidence in your child to persist toward their goals and succeed in all areas of life. Everyone faces challenges, yet mistakes and failures are necessary for your seven-year-old’s learning and development. With your guidance and support, mistakes become a tool for learning and growing confidence.

The key to any parenting issue is finding ways to communicate to meet your and your child’s needs. The steps below include specific, practical strategies and effective conversation starters to prepare you as you address any issue with your child.

As you address any issues, you build the foundation for your child’s development.

Your focus on cultivating a safe, trusting relationship and promoting life skills can create:

● greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment

● trust in each other

● a sense of well-being and motivation

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that builds your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role to use on any issues and builds essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Throughout this tool, there are opportunities for children to:

● become more self-aware and deepen their social awareness

● exercise their self-management skills

● build their relationship skills

● demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making and problem-solving

This five-step process helps you and your child with any issue. It builds critical life skills in your child. The same process can be used to address other specific parenting issues (learn more about the process[1] ).

Whether it’s your child having difficulty meeting new friends or you are dealing with your feelings of inadequacy when trying to respond to your child’s frustration, these steps can be applied to any situation to support your child. You can tailor these questions and statements to match any arising issue.

Tip: These steps are best done when you and your child are not tired or in a rush.

Tip: Intentional communication[2] and healthy parenting relationships[3] will support these steps.

Based on your child’s development milestones, you will want to focus on the following as you move through the five steps:

● supporting child’s growing sense of autonomy - being able to do things or make basic decisions, like what to wear, on their own

● practicing consistency with expected behavior, rules, and consequences

● encouraging flexibility while supporting your child’s need for structure

● modeling positive social skills, responsible choices, and going easy on yourself when you make mistakes (noticing self-talk)

● supporting and offering ways to regulate strong emotions

Getting your child’s input will help you better understand their thoughts, feelings[4] , and challenges related to...