Being a good parent can feel like an impossible achievement. And if you mess up, the consequences feel dire—your child’s well-being is on the line, after all. It’s true that your parenting skills will inform and impact the health of your family and your child. But it’s also true that no parent is perfect, nor should they be.
While perfection is not the ultimate goal, you can learn to improve your caretaking abilities through good parenting tips and examples of good parenting. Feeling more confident and well-equipped to parent will boost both your well-being and your child’s.
What Are Good Parenting Skills?
Good parenting skills prioritize a child’s safety, security, and physical and emotional well-being. These skills help a child grow up to have high self-worth, a healthy attachment style, compassion, self-compassion, and trust in the world around them. In other words, good parenting skills help children to become healthy, well-adjusted adults who treat themselves and others well.
Research shows that good parenting skills help teens have better mental health and higher self-esteem. Furthermore, skillful parenting can prevent teens from experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
Parenting skills examples include being able to set boundaries, knowing how to talk to a teenager, and dealing with defiant teens. Moreover, good parenting skills also encompass self-care, like finding ways to stay calm when facing parenting challenges.
Why Are Parenting Skills Important?
Gaining better parental skills can help your child become better adjusted and improve their mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Good parenting skills foster confidence, self-esteem, self-worth, and trust in your teen. These skills also help your child seek out and maintain healthy relationships. And good parenting helps your child foster key life skills, such as developing healthy coping mechanisms for difficult emotions.
Furthermore, parental skills improve your relationship with your teenage son or teenage daughter. If you work to improve your parenting, your child will be more likely to trust you and value your input. They’ll come to you more often with their problems and concerns. And both of you will feel more connected and secure in your relationship.
Good parenting matters not only for you, but for the whole family. Good parenting skills inform the family dynamic and the health and well-being of everyone in it.
10 Top Parenting Skills
Every parent wants to raise healthy, happy, successful kids. But that’s easier said than done. At one time or another, anyone who parents will experience a moment where they feel too exhausted, frustrated, and emotionally depleted to be the best parent they can be.
And that’s okay. Nobody is perfect, including parents. You don’t have to be at your best all the time in order to raise well-adjusted and healthy kids. And there is no cookie cutter way to parent that works for everyone. Many different parenting styles can be effective and positive.
But there are skills you can cultivate to improve your parenting style and your relationship with your kids. A scientific analysis of parenting skills by Robert Epstein whittled these down to 10 practices, which he called “The Parents’ Ten.” These 10 parenting skills are based on a combination of expert advice, things that appear to be most effective, and the things parents actually do.
Here are Epstein’s 10 parenting skills.
- Love and affection, including unconditional love, physical affection, praise, and quality time together
- Stress management, through regulating your own nervous system as well as your child’s—including practicing and teaching effective ways to relax and express emotions in a healthy way
- Relationship skills, including showing respect and care for others even in conflict
- Encouraging autonomy and independence by treating your child with respect and high regard and supporting body autonomy, consent, and self-reliance
- Prioritizing education and learning, by allowing your child to explore their curiosities, as well as providing appropriate educational opportunities for them
- Modeling life skills, like financial and future planning
- Behavior management, through extensive use of positive reinforcement rather than punishment or other punitive measures
- Supporting health, including both physical and mental health practices for yourself and your child
- Spirituality, which may look like a respect for nature, a connection to something bigger than oneself, or a compassionate religion
- Ensuring your child’s safety, including mental, physical, and emotional safety, by being aware of their activities, behaviors, mental health, and friendships
Is Unconditional Love a Parenting Skill?
Focusing on unconditional love is one of the healthiest and most useful parenting skills to develop. Unconditional love means a parent loves their child regardless of the child’s achievements, outcomes, or mistakes.
In other words, the child knows they don’t have to do anything to earn their parent’s love. They are loved, respected, and accepted for exactly who they are, not what they accomplish.
But unconditional love doesn’t mean you should be lax in setting boundaries or upholding expectations and consequences. On the contrary, kids respond better to parents who are firm, but also fair and warm.
Unconditional love is a bit too broad and all-encompassing to be considered a skill on its own. But many good parenting skills can be found under the umbrella of unconditional love. These skills include things like respect, validation, praise, and supporting independence and autonomy.
