What are Positive Parenting Skills?
Parenting is one of the most difficult tasks in life. For this reason, it’s very important to develop good parenting skills from the beginning. Among these, positive parenting skills are those that allow parents to carry out their work in a responsible and respectful way.
In general, all parents have certain capacities to fulfill their role. However, different factors can condition their implementation.
Children depend on good bonding to thrive, and parents have to work hard to achieve this. For this reason, today we want to share with you those fundamental tools to raise your little ones.
Positive parenting skills or abilities?
When we talk about positive parenting skills (PPS) we’re referring to the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral resources that parents use in raising their children. With them, they manage to provide their children with affection and security and promote the necessary conditions for them to develop in a healthy way.
Before delving into this topic, it’s important to differentiate two key concepts:
- Parental abilities or competencies, which are those personal characteristics of parents to adequately cope with the upbringing of their children.
- Parental skills, which refer to the implementation of each of the parental capacities that are available.
We all have parental capacities, as we’re prepared to play the role of parents. However, not all of us have the necessary skills to put them into practice.
What are the roles of positive parenting skills in childhood?
To be considered PPS, they must fulfill three essential functions.
Socializing function
Positive parenting skills allow the child to make a construction of themself and to maintain good interactions with the environment.
So, the mission of parents is to serve as an example for children to acquire socially acceptable behaviors. This is essential for them to learn to relate to others in a respectful way.
Nurturing function
Raising healthy and upright individuals requires nurturing them physically and emotionally. Therefore, secure attachment from the earliest stages allows youngsters to feel safe and secure to experiment outside the nest.
Educational function
The world is what its members can achieve. Therefore, if we want to give our children a better world, we must transmit good values to them. Among them, responsibility and respect for human life and nature.
What positive parenting skills are required in the first years of life?
During early childhood, it’s essential to contribute to the positive and appropriate development of children. To achieve this, it’s crucial to appeal to certain personal capacities that are part of positive parenting: Empathy, flexibility, altruism, the ability to solve problems, and assertiveness.
Along these lines, the positive parenting skills necessary for raising a child in early childhood are as follows:
- Empower: Encourages children to strive to develop their own capacities to achieve their personal and social goals.
- Establish warm affective bonds: These provide them with emotional security.
- Support and stimulate: This helps the development of their internal capacities.
- Structure: An environment with clear limits gives children the external and internal security necessary to achieve calm.
- Educating without violence: This is an indispensable condition for raising individuals who build a just and peaceful society.
The consequences of positive parenting skills
Children begin a long journey of life with us and the consequences of different parenting styles will be evident in the short and long term.
When positive parenting skills are implemented, some aspects of children’s lives benefit directly, such as their physical, emotional, and psychological health.
In turn, parents who put these skills into practice educate in a calmer and more respectful way. This allows your children to grow up in a much more joyful and peaceful environment, where respect, affection, and solidarity are the norm.
For this reason, in the future, children raised with PPS will be healthier, more balanced, and more just people.
Adopt some of these parenting habits!
As you’ve seen in this article, positive parenting skills favor the development and education of children. We can all have certain parenting capacities, but we don’t necessarily have the resources to put them into practice.
It’s important that parents observe themselves and reflect frequently in order to recalculate our parenting and education strategies.
The success of a child’s education depends not only on the school they attend but also on our active role as parents.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Capano, Á., & Ubach, A. (2013). Estilos parentales, parentalidad positiva y formación de padres. Ciencias psicológicas, 7(1), 83-95. En internet : http://www.scielo.edu.uy/scielo.php?pid=s1688-42212013000100008&script=sci_arttext
- Gómez Fraguela, X. A., & Villar Torres, P. (2001). Los padres y madres ante la prevención de conductas problemáticas en la adolescencia. La aplicación del programa Construyendo salud: Promoción de habilidades parentales. CEAPA.
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Ger, S., & Sallés, C. (2011). Las competencias parentales en la familia contemporánea: descripción, promoción y evaluación. Educación social. Revista de intervención socioeducativa, 49, 25-47.
