As we begin each new year, we are excited to share our top ten parenting tips. This list highlights the best practices and addresses some trends we have observed over the past year. Some of these tips may be familiar to you, while others might be new. Regardless, we hope this list serves as thoughtful encouragement to you as you kick off 2025!
10) Have fun and enjoy your kids – It’s easy to get wrapped up in parenting, work, and the hustle of everyday life, causing us to forget the importance of having fun with our children. That’s why Family Fun Night is so essential. Research indicates that spending quality time together as a family enhances cognitive and physical development, as well as social and emotional growth. We need to enjoy our time with our children, and they need to enjoy their time with us!
9) Say what you mean, mean what you say – When you give instructions, are they easily understood, or are they veiled with some ambiguity? For example: “Are you ready to go to bed?” “Are you ready to leave?” “Clean up your room okay?” Parents often attempt to soften an instruction by phrasing it as a question, which can make it seem more like an option rather than a directive that needs to be followed. If you want your instruction to be followed, it’s important to “say what you mean and mean what you say.”
8) Give your child the freedom to fail – In our opinion, children do not fail. They will make mistakes and they will fall short of certain expectations, but these are important teaching moments. As parents, we never want to see our children fail, but they need to learn valuable life lessons in a loving home environment. We need to give them the freedom to grow!
7) Parent during a time of non-conflict (TONIC) – Trying to parent when our boys were going nuts in a restaurant never worked! Nor did it work in the middle of the grocery store. Yes, we did have to deal with the immediate problem properly, but the actual parenting (heart/character training) happened when there was no conflict triggering their or our amygdala. Parenting during a time of non-conflict (TONIC) creates a calm environment for your children to hear and understand the lessons and appropriate behavior you are trying to teach them.
6) Role playing – One of the most effective tools we used during TONIC parenting was role playing. It’s a fun way to teach many things we, as parents, may think are intuitive, but are not. How to properly greet guests coming to our house and how to advocate for yourself with a teacher are just some of the situations we role played with our boys.
5) Mealtime as a family – Research from Stanford shows that family mealtime is critical to a healthy family environment. It is a vehicle that creates a place of belonging and connection. Do you need to have every meal together? No, but the idea is to be characterized by sharing meals together as a family. For us, that might mean only sharing a couple of meals one week but several more the next week.
4) Marriage is the priority – Before we had our boys, we were a family – just the two of us. It is so easy to become child-centered in this day and age, but your marriage needs to be the first priority. That doesn’t mean we diminish the importance of our children or our parenting. Rather the marriage priority enhances both.
3) CouchTime – CouchTime got us on the same page with our parenting so we weren’t overcompensating for each other. CouchTime got both our boys to sleep through the night… in their own beds! CouchTime improved our boys’ behavior. Need to kick start your CouchTime? Check out our “CouchTime Conversations Cards!”
2) Speak Life – Words matter and how we verbally express ourselves has a significant neurological impact on our children, spouses, and everyone we meet. Speaking words of life is not an easy skill to learn. It needs to be consistently practiced for it to be effective. Choosing your words thoughtfully and how you phrase them, will improve the way you parent… and your marriage!
1) Keep learning – Parenting is a process and how you parent a 3 year old is different than a 10 year old or teenager. That’s why we consistently participated in parenting classes. We realized early on that we wouldn’t be able to implement or remember everything we learned from our very first class. However, with each class we attended, we could see that the investment we made in our family was paying off. How do we know? Because we LOVED the teen years and our boys, as crazy as it may sound, actually thanked us for being intentional with our parenting when they saw some of their peers struggling.
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Heading into 2025, we would encourage you to start thinking about taking a parenting class/conference, attending a marriage retreat or joining a small group in the new year (Online or hopefully in person). All of our online classes are in the evening and open to anyone regardless of location – Last year we had parents join us from New York to Los Angeles, Asia, Europe and Africa!
Click on the links for additional online class information and registration:
Parenting Toddlerhood Transitions (18mos to 5yrs) – Tues Jan 14th, 7:30 – 8:30 – 5 Sessions – https://events.humanitix.com/toddlers-jan2025
Parenting the Middle Years (7yrs through Teens) – Thus Jan 16th, 7:00 – 8:00 – 5 Sessions – https://events.humanitix.com/midyrs-jan2025
Parenting from The Tree of Life (Our Main Parenting class covering 5Yrs To Teens) – Sun Feb 6th, 7:00 – 8:00 – 10 Sessions – https://events.humanitix.com/pftol-feb2025
Our SYMBIS online marriage assessment & check up is ongoing and available anytime: https://onefamilyhwl.org/product/symbis/
In you are in the Denver Area, we also teach a Family Foundations class on Sundays at 9am @ Cherry Hills Community Church in room 107 – no registration needed – Applying biblical truth to marriage and parenting applications!
Blessings to your family in 2025!
Shelly and Rich