Growing a strong bond with your child is important for your child’s development and your experience as a parent. However, a lot of parents don’t have the luxury of being able to spend lots of time with their children, as they are often too busy working to be able to afford to send their kids to a good school and get a head start in life.
So, you will find that you will need to make the most of the precious moments you have with your children, and how to make the bond between you strong, despite everything else that might be happening in your lives. A bond will be strong long into adulthood, but you have to make sure that you establish it and maintain it all through your childhood and teenage years.
#1 Playing Games Together
Playing games together is a great way to bond. Not only are you bonding over an activity that you are both enjoying, but you are also learning together. Games can be a great way for children to learn skills and discover their strengths and having you with them through this process will deepen your understanding of each other immensely. You can learn how your child is developing, what their interests are, and how they think through a couple of different games.
Lawn games, such as cornhole, can be a major bonus here. Not only is it encouraging your child to play outside, but it is also a great team or individual game that can help with hand-eye coordination, spatial acumen, and patience. You can make it even more special and enjoyable for your time by looking into personalized cornhole games. If you both have a similar interest, such as NFL, or play particular rules of cornhole, this can be a great time to make something that is already special for both of you truly unique.
#2 Having Shared Hobbies
Having shared hobbies is different from playing games together. It can be a really important way to not only teach your child about a certain subject that you both might enjoy, but it might also be to enjoy some quiet time together. If you have joint hobbies, you could encourage your child to partake in more than one, depending on how the mood takes you.
For example, a good quiet hobby would be birdwatching or silent reading together, and a much more active hobby could be playing football together, doing crafts, or problem-solving. This can be a great way for you to not only teach your child that they can have fun and be quiet, and enjoy their own company a little, but it also allows them to enjoy something with you, so even if you don’t really get along over most things, you have an area of shared knowledge that can have you talking for hours.
#3 Chores
Doing chores together and mundane tasks such as cooking and cleaning might not strike you as a fun way to spend your time but can help you feel a little more connected with your child. You will feel that they are learning essential skills as well as spending time with you. It can even be a great way to make cleaning and chores fun, helping them to become a much cleaner person in the future. Remember, for children, if it’s a game and is fun for them, it is not a chore, it is a good time well spent.
#4 Having activity days
Having days when you just go out for activities and you have some fun is crucial to your child’s bond with you. The more that they learn and experience with you, the more that they are going to be happy to spend time with you. You will find that special days orientated around them and their interests are likely to help them enjoy being with you, even if you are just heading down to the park and having a picnic while they play on the equipment there. Better still, if you can use this time to feed their imagination and play pretend games (like finding sticks and making Harry Potter wands) you can give them an experience they will remember for years to come.
#5 Learning
Learning, such as going to school and doing homework, can be tough on a young mind. As a child, all they want to do is play and because of this might not understand why it is so important for them to sit down and spend their evenings completing sheet after sheet of math homework. So, it is important that you sit with your child through this and you help them, as well as keep them focused if they need it and act as a body double to help them focus and work through their extra chores.
#6 Conflicts
If your child is misbehaving, and the two of you are having conflicts, you are going to have to rethink what is going on. A child will react emotionally to situations, and if they are lashing out, yelling, and throwing tantrums, it might not be because they aren’t getting their way. You need to try and sit down with them about this and communicate what is happening. This can help them become emotionally more intelligent and can help reduce clashes in the future, as well as make you a person that they know they can talk to in the future.
#7 Boundaries
Everyone has boundaries. Even your children. A lot of parents seem to think that their children don’t know what they want and say that boundaries are just a way for them ‘to get what they want’. In reality, a lot of the time, you need to respect your child. If they don’t want to do something, for a child, it means that they don’t feel safe.
As mentioned earlier, they act emotionally, so if a child is crying and screaming over something, and you as a parent are saying ‘well they usually like it’ it might mean that something has changed, and you need to figure out what it is. It might not even be something remotely associated with what they are crying and screaming about, it might just be that someone doesn’t respect them saying no and did something a lot worse to them and you going against it is triggering a fear response.
#8 Your Spouse
If your spouse is in the picture, you need to make sure that you are showing them affection in front of your child. You need to take the responsibility to show them what a healthy and loving relationship looks like, to help them spot when relationships turn toxic in their later years. You will find that this helps them to potentially pick out a better partner.
If your spouse is not in the picture, and you are a single parent, you need to decide what is best for your child, whether this is making sure that they remember their other parent if they lost them to an accident or illness, or helping them move on if it was something such as divorce. If you are currently going through a breakup or a divorce, you need to understand that it isn’t just your relationship, it is your family being broken apart and it is a longstanding issue for you and your kids. If you manage to find a stepparent that your child enjoys and accepts as their own, that is your choice, but you need to listen to your child if there is something wrong.