You think that your natural instincts will help you be a good parent? It’s true that intuition helps a lot, but it is often buried deep down under layers of stress and emotions.

Besides, the more you learn, the better you will become at something including parenting. How do you help your kids become happy, kind and successful people? Here are seven invaluable tips to help you with this.

1. Sticking to the Positive

The simplest way to be happy is to avoid focusing on the negative. Try to relax and to have more fun with your kids. This will make them happy too.

Even when bad things happen, you should do your best to keep the positive tone in your communication with your children. You would not want to burden them with frustration and sadness. Remember that youngsters take everything more personally compared to adults, even if they don’t show it.

Keep your emotions under control and choose your words carefully to raise kids who don’t give into negative emotions and who aren’t afraid of facing challenges.

2. Balance between Work and Play

Modern parents follow a ruthless logic. When children receive good education and accumulate a diverse set of skills including sports and artistic ones, they will be successful in life.

It is awesome to send your kids to a good school and for them to practice various sports and to take music, dance and other lessons, but not if their schedule gets too busy. Put yourself into their shoes. If you are given more work at the office than you can handle constantly, you will get tired and disinterested eventually.

Kids can get burdened by a lot less. The conclusion: try to give your kids enough time to play and have fun with their family and their peers.

This will help them to rest, to study and learn new skills more effectively and to grow healthy and happy.

3. Encouraging Effort

We live in a world in which achievement is put on a pedestal. Everyone wants to be the best person in something. However, this is not always possible even if you try super hard.

That is why it is utterly wrong to teach kids to be maximalists. As explained earlier, they take things in more deeply than adults do.

That is why failure and even success in something can have much stronger impact on their mind and personality. The idea is to motivate kids to do well in everything which they take up, but not to make give them the ultimatum all or nothing.

Even if they don’t do as well as expected, you should stress on how proud you are of their hard work instead of simply saying that with more effort, they will do better the next time around.

4. Teaching Self-Discipline

This is the best way to ensure that you will raise kids who are responsible and well-organized. It all starts with developing basic habits from a younger age.

For instance, it’s important to teach your youngsters that they should make their beds first before rushing out to play in the backyard. Rewards are helpful, but only to a certain extent. You wouldn’t want to show your children that they can get a treat for every simple thing that they do.

Giving example is essential for getting good results in the end. If you set up rules, make sure that you will keep them too. If you get around them, your kids will certainly follow. It is equally important to keep your word every time you promise something, even if it’s difficult.

5. Developing Emotional Intelligence

It is a common misconception that people are naturally born with a certain level of intellectual or emotional intelligence and that it cannot be improved. The reality is that learning is often much more important compared to what you have given, especially when it comes to understanding human emotions.

Helping your children to develop a set of skills for recognizing and coping with emotions will enable them to become confident and responsible adults. This is actually easier than you think. It is all about teaching your kids to recognize their emotions and put a label on them.

You just need to ask questions to point them into the right direction. Let them understand the situation and cope with it instead of offering immediate comfort and trying to make up for what’s happened. When they learn to recognize their emotions, children will be able to do the same with others too. This is invaluable for effective communication and for building relationships.

6. Focus on Compassion

You are certainly familiar with the old saying that being kind is more important than being right. Showing empathy and support and actually helping others are crucial things which children need to learn from a young age. This is how they can build strong bonds with people around and become active members of the community.

The best environment for learning these things is in the family. It is equally important to encourage compassionate behavior during play and especially when conflict between kids arises. The truth is that people who are caring are much happier and much more successful in everything they do including personal relationship.

7. Maintaining Good Self-Esteem

The goal is to get the balance between high and low self-confidence right. This is very challenging for all parents and especially for those who have teens.

The key thing to remember is that kids take things more personally and more literally too. It’s fine for an adult to admit that they aren’t good at math, but telling children that they will never be good at it can be hurtful and frustrating. Another important tip is to avoid comparison, especially to peers.

You should pick your words wisely and try to point out the good qualities which your kids have. Similarly, it’s important to encourage effort, as said earlier. At the same time, you should be careful not to pump up the self-esteem of youngsters much. Recognize mistakes and failure and provide support to help youngsters do better the next time around.

Use all of the advice shared here to raise kids who are happy, kind and self-confident.