Here Are Your Top Parenting Tips
We ran a contest on the Offspring Facebook group (yes, we have a Facebook group – have you joined us yet?), Asking participants to share their best parenting tricks with us. The entries were so smart, so thoughtful, so helpful that we decided to share some of our favorites.
The winning hacker belongs to Christopher Bickerstaff, the father of a 10-year-old daughter from Overland Park, Kansas. He wrote:
“To encourage my daughter to talk about her friendship and my day, I started talking to her about mine. Relationships in the workplace are remarkably similar to those in elementary school. So when I tell her that one executive has a habit of making inappropriate comments, but that few people call him because they don’t want to rock the boat, it encourages her to share her own experiences with peer pressure. … “
We loved this idea – it normalizes the struggle by showing the child that you are a real person with real problems. And it’s much more exciting start to the conversation than terrible, “How was your day?” Congratulations Christopher!
Here are some more hacks from the Facebook contest that we store in our toolbox:
Learn Waiting Fingers
“My 2-year-old struggled with waiting and whining for a while, so I came up with the waiting fingers. When she needs to wait for something, I make her wiggle her fingers furiously. It really helped, and now she will do the waiting fingers quietly and without prompting when she needs to wait. “
Christine T.
Make a toy condominium
“My 4 year old son has too many stuffed toys, so we built a ‘toy condo’ with 10 small cardboard boxes. We cut out the doors and glue them in different directions. Now my son puts all his stuffed toys in the apartment at night so that they can “fall asleep.” This will prevent spilling everything on his bed and help collect trash around the house. ”
Hunter H.
Use the shirt as a rag.
“Pop-up rags have never worked. Inevitably, my son would hit somewhere behind the rag, or it would just drip onto my shirt. So, I just started wearing a T-shirt over my clothes. Much more space that he could not “miss”. Of course, there was a day or two when I left the house, still not taking it off. “
Rob O.
Load them with information
“Bombard their current interests with information. If they like tigers today, take them to the zoo to watch them, show free tiger documentaries on YouTube, ask them to draw a tiger, read tiger books in the library, etc. Do this until their interest changes. and then it will change. “
Caleb E.
Imagine your kids are Rocky
“To help the 3-year-old and 6-year-old get dressed in the morning, right after breakfast I start humming the Rocky song loudly, set my phone timer and send them off to the race to see who is the fastest to get dressed. We run the time board, and when a new “record” is set, they become “champions,” and I award them with a plastic gold medal for the rest of the morning. We went from lounging for fifteen minutes with ankle-length underwear to fully clothed in three minutes. “
Nancy R.
Make your food bags serve a dual purpose
“Fill a renewable food bag with expensive diaper cream that comes only in tube form (triple paste). Much easier to apply and you don’t have to drag your bath around! “
Jamie A.
Find this old iPod
Instead of watching TV, my almost three-year-old wears headphones and an old iPod full of music, but never plays children’s music. He is obsessed with Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Janelle Monet, OKGO, Stevie Wonder. Finding a song, he wants to strengthen his reading skills, and he sings and dances for us with all his heart. All around wins.
Anna r.
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