The secret ingredient to helping our children grow isn’t a “what” but a “how”, a process we can adjust and refine as we go along.
In my last post, I talked about a common element found across approaches that support children’s growth, whether academic, socio-emotional, or cognitive: Taking the child’s experience and viewpoint into account. The researchers called this “Parental Consideration”.
Parental Consideration isn’t one specific technique to use with your child. Rather, you can think of it as an essential ingredient that can look different depending on how it’s prepared and what dish you’re making, but which always helps the dish taste better.
But what does this “essential Ingredient” look like, and what various forms can it take?
According to the research, parents are facilitating their children’s development and learning when they:
- Pay attention to all aspects of their children’s experience (verbal and non-verbal)
- Acknowledge, validate, and consider their child’s emotions
- Take their child’s current capacity and state into account
- Respond without excessive delay
- Foster their child’s active participation
- Take their child’s interests and opinions into account
- Use collaborative and informational language when talking to their child.
Notice how these all involve some aspects of noticing, interpreting and responding to the child’s experience or point of view, that Notice-Interpret-Respond framework I mentioned earlier.
You can see that the ingredient isn’t actually a ‘what’ but a ‘how”. It’s not about specific techniques you do TO your child, but about the quality of attention and understanding you bring to your interactions with them.
This is why parental consideration can look so different, yet have the same helpful effect across situations, and why it can be adapted to different ages and contexts. It’s a versatile ingredient: the form changes, but the essence remains the same.
But here’s the thing: noticing, interpreting, and responding with consideration aren’t intuitive skills you can simply decide to implement perfectly starting tomorrow. They’re nuanced processes that develop over time with practice.
Reframing these qualities as a “how” instead of a “what” can help take the pressure off through our parenting journey. Often, parenting advice we see online or receive from others (including professionals) can feel like predetermined solutions we just need to apply as instructed. Yet the solutions can be confusing or frustrating because the advice is often disconnected from what we know about our child and what feels actually doable within our family life. This is because the advice is often a fixed “what,” whereas parental consideration is a dynamic “how”, a process you adjust and improve as you go along.
Understanding parental consideration as a flexible process rather than a fixed formula can take some pressure off. But knowing this doesn’t automatically make it easy in the heat of the moment or tells you where to start.
In my next post: What gets in the way of tuning into our child’s experience, and how small shifts can help us start overcoming those barriers.