How to Help Your Child Make Good Choices

Don’t wait for your child to become a teenager to help them make good choices in mates.  Start now while they’re young by strengthening their intuitions. We can help them realize that the initial feelings they get when they have an experience are both real and valid. We can help them understand that those initial responses - whether they are good or bad - are telling them something about the situation they are in. 

Here are 6 things you can begin doing immediately to help your child discover, recognize, listen to, and trust his or her own intuitive feelings and inner wisdom:

Share Your Own Life Experiences. Create comfortable conversations with your child so you can share experiences where you listened and followed your own intuition and strong feelings to a good outcome.

Help Them Learn How to Trust Their Own Intuition. Talk openly about intuition - what it is, what it feels like, and how to respond to it. Invite them to come up with examples of times when they’ve experienced their own intuition.

Respectful Treatment by Others. Be a good role model on how to treat others, and set clear guidelines for your children on how they should expect others to treat them.

We Tell Others How to Treat Us. Share with your children that how we act around others, how we dress, and even how we talk can set precedence for how others will treat us.

Create More Silence. Create moments of peacefulness for you and your child. Ban media devices from their bedrooms and minimize unnecessary noise from televisions and radios.

Prayer, Meditation, or Just Moments of Silence. Promote prayer or meditation with your family, or simply create moments of silence. Teach them how to find and listen to the peacefulness within.

Once our children ‘spread their wings’ toward adulthood, we can’t very well control who they interact with, or especially, who they choose to date and invite into their lives. The power we possess is with what we choose to do now while we still have them at home with us. Don’t let the fear of the unknown for your child’s future paralyze you. Let it sharpen your parenting knowledge so you can do what’s best now to better prepare them for what lies ahead.

Bill Corbett has a degree in clinical psychology and is the author of the award winning book “Love, Limits, & Lessons: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Cooperative Kids,” in English and in Spanish.  He is happily married with three grown children, two grandchildren, and three step children.  You can visit his Web site www.CooperativeKids.com for further information and parenting advice.