Spring clean your parenting techniques! Here are 6 ways to tidy up unhealthy practices

Put your parenting techniques through a deep clean.

When we say spring cleaning, your first thought may go to projects in your pantry, closet or yard. However, we’re digging into a more personal project.

Studio 5 Parenting Contributor Heather Johnson says now is the time to spring clean our parenting techniques. She shares how we can spruce up, declutter, and clean our unhealthy practices.

To contact Heather for counseling, email blog.familyvolley@gmail.com, or visit www.familyvolley.blogspot.com.

6 Ways to Spring Clean Your Parenting Techniques

1. Throw out the blame

Blame is the discharge or getting rid of uncomfortable emotions. As parents, we fall into traps of blaming our problems and situations on others. We need to commit to solution-seeking instead of blaming.

2. Throw out the fear

Assess where you parent out of fear. Replace it with what you know instead of what you are afraid of.

3. Talk less

Time to talk less so there is more room to acknowledge instead of convincing, understand instead of judge, and hear instead of tell.

4. Begin again

Look at the relationships in your life, with each of your children, is there one that need a fresh start. Forgiveness, apologies, making amends. Then do it! Do whatever it takes to start fresh and recommit. Recommit out loud to them so they know the road you are headed down.

5. Throw out the labels

It is easy over the course of the seasons, especially winter, haha! To label our children. It is time to throw the labels out. They cloud our ability to parent from a healthy place. And our children tend to live up to whatever we “call” them.

Also throw out how we have labeled parenting in general. If we have decided it is too hard, unfair, we have to do it all, those labels will also keep us from being the parent we want to be.

6. Throw out the schedule

Now is the time to look at the places where your time is imbalanced, your schedule too booked and over worked. Get rid of those things that don’t contribute to who you say you want to be and the family you say you want to have.