5 Critical Millennial Parenting Skills While Raising Today’s Kids

Being a parent today is an enormous task just by itself. If a monetary value were to be attributed to the job of being a parent it would end up being one of the highest-paid jobs. The millennial generation is tackling parenting differently than the generation before. While our grandparents and parents were able to raise a handful of kids, for the millennial parents just a child or two is more than enough.

Children today are hyperactive, smarter, and much more aware of their needs, likes, dislikes, and the world around them. They cannot be fooled easily or maneuvered the way parents want. They need to be handled quite differently than the children of some twenty years back.

5 Critical millennial parenting skills that are required while raising today’s children:

1. Be a good role model

Children learn by imitating and not when they are ordered or told. They cannot be coaxed or coerced into doing something in the long term. By order or by force only will work for the short term. If you really want them to grow up into beautiful, compassionate, and responsible human beings, then become one yourself. This is the best skill to have as a parent in today’s day and time.

2. Become a friendly parent

Today, it is not about being just a parent or a friend to a child. Millennial parents need to move away from the helicopter parenting style of their predecessors. Children need friendly parents, someone whom they can come to with their wants and needs, someone with whom they can share and confide and someone whom they can look up to and also feel comfortable at the same time. Guide them as a friend, be there to help, and lift them up when they fall. As a child, they not only need parental security but also parents who can come down to their level to understand them.

3. Be communicative as well as non-judgmental

This is one skill that is really required for millennial parents. Gone are the days when children would blindly follow whatever the parents said and chose whatever the parents allowed without any ifs and buts. Kids today have a mind of their own. From a very young age, they know what they want. When they come and talk to you, communicate with them without being judgmental. Guide them and tell them about the pros and cons of things without thrusting upon them the final decision. Do not put your own racial, religious, and gender biases in their heads. Let them decide while you guide them from the periphery. It is hard but doable.

4. Discarding the one-size-fits-all mentality

Parents need to understand that there is no single right way to raise kids. Each child is unique and different, so the approach to handling every child has to be different. To raise happy, strong, and self-reliant children, the way the child is handled at home is extremely important. It is not necessarily what has worked for your one child who will work for the other. This understanding will help parents in understanding and bringing up their children much better.

5. Patience

This is one of the most important aspects of today’s parenting. The super fast and busy, stressful lives that parents lead today, has robbed them of their patience levels. Getting irritated at the stream of questions that the little one bombards you with after a hard day at the office is enough reason to lose your cool at times. The situation demands patience from you as a parent. Instead of resorting to quick-fix means of giving a child an easy way out for yourself, like handing over the mobile phone or switching on the television, figure out ways that can work for both of you.

Whatever parenting style the millennial parents choose to follow, it needs to be kept in mind that it should aim to cultivate their kid’s unique identity and self-expression.