What is a parenting mindset? 

In short, it’s about your expectations and how you mentally frame your experiences. If you’ve ever wondered why things often turn out as we expect them to, it’s because we essentially create self-fulfilling prophecies. Our mindset is the lens through which we see life, and specifically for parenting, the lens through which we see our children. 

For example, if you’ve traditionally struggled with your child and think of them as “rebellious,” your mindset may pose a problem for you. Even if they’re having a real struggle and needing support, if your mindset about their behavior has “rebellious” attached to it, you may be unable to see their struggle, much less empathize with it. You may feel defeated and wonder if there’s any hope in sight. This mindset is alienating. 

Conversely, if you generally enjoy parenting and think of your kids as being kind, generous, and helpful, your “default” might be to expect more good days ahead. You’ll be more likely to “catch” them doing things right because you’re predisposed to looking for better behavior. When you see it, the reward centers of your brain tell you you were right! 

According to the Gottman Institute, thinking of your child as behaving badly disposes you to think of punishment. Thinking of your child as struggling to handle something difficult encourages you to help them through their distress.

Interestingly, your parenting mindset has very little to do with what your children do, and instead, it has more to do with what you do. In the examples above, the labels you were using created the lens through which you were looking at your children.

Choosing Your Mindset

The good news and the bad news is that your perceptions are right either way. If you’re prone to finding the good, you’ll see it. Likewise, if you’re negative, you’ll find that, too. Your own mindset can promote either a vicious or a virtuous cycle. 

Does that mean that if we focus on the positive, that we simply become blind to the negative and don’t see it anymore? Not at all. Interestingly, just like with plants, what we nurture, grows. The more we focus on the positive, the more positive there will be, and the less room there will be for the experiences we don’t want. 

Additionally, when there is something negative, our mindset can help us view it through a much more spacious perspective (focused on solutions and creative possibilities, rather than thinking “this one idea is the only possible solution,” or “my child is the problem”). 

Knowing this, we have the power to change our parenting mindset into a gift of expansiveness and curiosity. And this goes far beyond the labels we use. It can affect every part of our relationship with our children. 

The work starts with us. As parents, of course, we’re already well aware of our strengths and the areas we’re trying to improve. Knowing them isn’t enough, though. We need to do something with this information. It starts with building our parenting skills in some very simple and tangible ways.

What are three ways to build your parenting skills?

In addition to using positive parenting techniques, there are three specific ways you can affect your mindset and set yourself up for success:

1. Know Yourself

Take some time to get introspective about what you like and dislike about parenting. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having preferences – you’re human! Some parents are going to love sprinting around the soccer field or shooting hoops. Others are going to prefer storytime and crafting. 

Faking what you like and don’t like just to please your child isn’t going to serve anyone well in the long run. You won’t be having fun, nor will your child when they pick up on your displeasure. Know yourself…and be yourself. 

2. Play to Your Strengths

Our children will be better for our having modeled authenticity. Does that mean we need to force a rough-and-tumble child to sit and make paper dolls with us? Of course not. You can, however, work to find common ground. Once you find it, spend all the time you can there.

You’ll thrive with your child if you feel comfortable in each other’s presence because you’re both doing things you enjoy.

3. Release What’s Not “You”

As an example, I don’t really enjoy Legos, but my daughter does. Although I’m sometimes tempted to feel guilty that I don’t love Legos more, reality is that I simply don’t. I do love my child, of course. That’s enough.

I have learned to forgive myself for not loving every activity that she does, and I’ve accepted that this is what other people are for. I’m not even “supposed to” be the be-all-end-all for her entertainment. If her other parent or a grandparent wants to take on that role, or if she plays with them on her own, she can get her Lego “cup” filled. We all have that “thing” we can release.

Doing these things can help us parent our children better and more honestly.

What is the best way to parent a child? 

Knowing all of this, you can use peaceful parenting tools that prioritize the relationship with your child, and are authentic to you. As long as your parenting philosophy is centered around connection, it’s hard to go wrong. You’re modeling for your child how to live peacefully with others, how to love unconditionally, and perhaps most importantly, how to be yourself. Let your kids see they don’t need to fit in anyone else’s “mold” to be happy. 

Some of this takes time to learn, though, and some relationships are naturally trickier than others. Fortunately, we can do something about harder-than-average relationships with our kids.   

How can a parent-child relationship be improved? 

Much of society tends to focus externally: how can we change the child to fit the environment they’re in? How can we make them better people – more likeable, more compliant, easier to manage?

As hard as it may be to admit this sometimes, the real change needs to start with us. If we’re struggling with our child, we need to look within ourselves to see what we’re bringing to the relationship.

The parenting solutions we need often come from within rather than from driving behavior change in our child. This comes back, once again, to our parenting mindset. 

So what are some helpful tools for a healthy parenting mindset? 

With all of this in mind, the three tools I recommend for transforming your parenting mindset are visualization, mindfulness, and acceptance and release. Here is an explanation for each of these:

1. Visualization

When we visualize how we want things to be, it’s almost as effective as if we were actually experiencing the change in real life. Why is this? Every experience and every thought we have create and/or reinforce our neural pathways. 

What are neural pathways? In short, they’re our brain’s “roadmap” that tells us how to handle different situations. 

Some are subconscious. For example, if we have an itch on our leg, we might absentmindedly reach down to scratch it. Our brain has learned that scratching itches usually makes them feel better, so we don’t think about it when it happens.

Other responses are more intentional, but still don’t require a lot of mental effort. For example, when we back the car out of the garage, we naturally put our foot on the brake first so that we don’t move until we’re ready. Our brain knows to do this because we’ve practiced it over and over again.

Our parenting responses can become second nature like this, too. If we were consistently backing out of the garage without braking, we’d quickly have problems and have to teach ourselves how to be safer. Likewise, if we’re constantly yelling at our kids, for example, and don’t like how that feels, we can also be intentional about learning a new skill that eventually becomes a habit. 

How do we do this? Just like we make a choice to consciously remember to put on the brake (and our brain starts to “record” that decision in our neural pathways), we can make a choice to do something other than yelling when we’re frustrated with our child. 

We might, for example, practice taking a few deep breaths before reacting. We might practice saying a mantra to ourselves, such as, “I choose to be peaceful.” The more we practice it, the more our brains learn, “Oh, THIS is the new thing I do in this situation.” Eventually, it can become our default, just like backing up the car safely or scratching an itch. 

We have to visualize it for it to happen. It’s not magic. It takes conscious effort. When we picture it happening, though, our brain gets some of the practice it needs for real-life encounters. We’re literally – in a physiological sense – affecting our parenting mindset. 

2. Mindfulness

What do I mean by mindfulness? In short, I mean presence and/or meditation. When we feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, it helps get us out of “in the moment” thinking. 

It helps us connect to a higher awareness of the parent we’re trying to be. We can ask for help and guidance, and be open to receiving the gift of greater awareness. This can be a huge change in our mindset, moving us from focusing on problems to focusing on the bigger picture. 

Doing something as simple as a loving-kindness meditation is linked to increasing vagal tone (which promotes feelings of social connectedness and positive emotions), as well as an increase of positive emotions overall. (Here’s a simple meditation if you’re unfamiliar with this.)

From this place of greater internal peace, we can change our parenting mindset from one of contentiousness to one of expansive possibilities. 

3. Acceptance and release

This is one of the most important tools to affect your parenting mindset. It’s very much like what it sounds like: we accept what is rather than forcing what isn’t, and we release what we can’t control.

What does that look like in parenting? As an example, let’s say we always dreamed of raising a child who is outgoing and athletic and popular at school. In reality, though, we’ve birthed a child who has no interest in sports and is happy to spend their days reading, perhaps having only one or two good friends. 

Although it might be tempting to encourage our child to keep doing all the things we wanted them to do, we might give ourselves permission to grieve what we don’t have – and accept the child we do. We can release our desire to make them someone they’re not, and instead, embrace our reality.

When we do this, we can become open to having a much deeper and more loving relationship with our child. We can do the inner work to find peace with them and get to know them deeply – their passions, their motivations, and their heart.

From here, our relationship is much more likely to thrive.

Meet Your Author, Sarah R. Moore

Sarah R. Moore is the author of Peaceful Discipline: Story Teaching, Brain Science & Better Behavior, the founder of Dandelion Seeds Positive Parenting, and a Master Trainer for the Jai Institute for Parenting. She's a public speaker, armchair neuroscientist, and most importantly, a Mama. She's a lifelong learner with training in child development, trauma recovery, interpersonal neurobiology, and improv comedy. She helps bring JOY, EASE, and CONNECTION back to families around the globe. Her work has been featured internationally in print, online, on the radio, and on TV. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest & Twitter.