Not Seeing Your Issue?

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, your influence is pivotal in your infant’s success. There are intentional ways to foster a healthy parent-child relationship while instilling confidence in your infant to persist toward their goals and succeed in all areas of life. Everyone faces challenges, yet mistakes and failures are necessary for your infant’s learning and development. With your guidance and support, mistakes become a tool for learning and growing confidence.

The key to any parenting issue is finding ways to communicate to meet your and your infant’s needs. The steps below include specific, practical strategies and effective conversation starters to prepare you as you address any issue with your infant.

Why Any Issue?

Your infant’s secure and trusting connection with you is vital in their first year. You begin to build the foundation for your infant’s development as you address any issue.

Your focus on cultivating a safe, trusting relationship and promoting life skills can create:

• greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment
• trust in each other
• a sense of well-being and motivation

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that builds your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role to use on any issues and builds essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Throughout this tool, there are opportunities for infants to:

• become more self-aware and deepen their social awareness
• exercise their self-management skills
• build their relationship skills
• demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making and problem-solving

Five Steps for Any Issue

This five-step process helps you and your infant with any issue. It builds critical life skills in your infant. The same process can be used to address other specific parenting issues (learn more about the process).

Whether it’s your child crying when you leave their sight or you are dealing with your feelings of inadequacy when trying to respond to your child’s frustration, these steps can be applied to any situation to support your child. You can tailor these questions and statements to match any issue that is arising.

Based on your child’s development milestones, you will want to focus on the following as you move through the five steps:

• fostering early stages of independence by allowing your infant to explore and attempt simple tasks with supervision
• establishing consistent routines and gentle boundaries to provide a sense of security and predictability
• balancing structured activities with opportunities for free play to support your infant’s development while fostering adaptability
• demonstrating positive social interactions, making gentle corrections, and modeling self-soothing techniques
• providing nurturing support to help your infant understand, name, and manage their emotions as they learn to express themselves

Getting your infant’s input will help you better understand their thoughts, feelings, and challenges related to their feelings when confronting challenges. When your infant provides feedback, they:

• have a more significant stake in the issue, a sense of ownership, and often greater responsibility around resolving the issue
• are more motivated to work together on making informed decisions (understanding the reasons behind those decisions) about critical aspects of their life
• grow their self-control as well as problem-solving skills

Actions

Some examples of getting input from your infant are:

• “Show me what you do when you are happy.”
• “Which book would you like to read before bedtime?”
• “Do you want to play with blocks or puzzles?”
• “Where would you like to go for our outing today?”
• “Which toy would you like to take with you in the car?”
• “Which stuffed animal do you want to sleep with tonight?”
• “Which bedtime song should we sing tonight?”

It’s easy to forget that infants learn daily. Your infant is likely to make some mistakes. How you handle those moments can determine how you help grow their confidence. Learning about developmental milestones can help you better understand what your infant is experiencing.

For example, infants and children ages 0-5:

• begin to understand and follow simple rules and routines, such as bedtime and mealtime
• start to assert independence and may resist or challenge rules and limits set by caregivers
• thrive on positive reinforcement and encouragement to build confidence in their abilities
• crave predictability and may struggle with transitions or changes in routine
• demonstrate growing emotional regulation but will have outbursts or tantrums when overwhelmed
• begin to show empathy and understanding of others’ feelings, though they may struggle to express their own emotions clearly
• explore cause-and-effect relationships through play and simple problem-solving tasks
• show an increasing interest in social interactions with peers and adults
• begin to develop basic communication skills, such as using words to express needs and desires
• demonstrate curiosity and eagerness to explore their environment through play and exploration

Teaching is different than just telling. Teaching builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your infant for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems.

Cultivate a learning mindset to promote beliefs and attitudes that grow confidence and support independence in your infant. Learn to listen to what’s not being said and model positive and thoughtful responses. Asking, reflecting, and affirming can be part of modeling new approaches. Infants might feel like they are the only ones experiencing a particular challenge in their worlds. Normalizing your infant’s challenges can also reassure them that everyone faces difficulties in all areas of life.

Actions

Here are some ways that you can teach new skills to your infant:

• “Watch how I do this, and then you can try it.” 
• “Let’s do this together, step by step.” 
• “Let’s do this together! Watch how I do it first.”
• “Now it’s your turn to try. You can do it!”
• “I’ll show you step by step. First, we…”
• “See how I’m doing it? Try to copy what I’m doing.”
• “I’ll show you once, and then you can try it yourself.” 
• “Pay attention to how I hold it, then you try.” 
• “Look at my hands. They’re doing this. Can you copy me?”

Daily routines can be opportunities for your infant to practice new skills. Practice grows vital new brain connections that strengthen each time your infant works hard toward a goal or demonstrates belief in themselves. It also provides significant opportunities to increase self-efficacy. Strive to create the conditions to support their success, and take time to explore what makes them feel confident and what takes away from their confidence. Share your experiences and skills you use when you don’t feel confident.

Actions

Here are some examples of ways you can practice with your infant:

• “Let me see you try it now.”
• “Let’s do it again together, and then you can do it yourself.”
• “I’m so proud of you for trying! Let’s do it a bit more.”
• “Let’s practice a little bit every day.”
• “The more we practice, the easier it gets. Let’s keep trying.”
• “You’re doing so well! Keep going!”
• “Practicing is like exercising our brains. The more we do it, the stronger we get.”

By providing support, you reinforce your infant’s ability to succeed, help them grow cause-and-effect thinking (as they address problems and failures), and help them take responsibility.

Actions

Here are some examples of how you can support your infant’s development and success:

• “I noticed how you raised your arms to help me get your shirt on. Nice job!”
• “I know this is scary. Would holding your bear help while we do this?”
• “We will first do this and then that. Okay?”
• “You did a great job stacking those blocks! You’re really good at building.”
• “I see you’re feeling frustrated. Would you like some help figuring it out?”

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your infant is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your infant’s confidence. Your recognition also encourages safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your infant’s efforts. It is helpful to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your infant’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your infant. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is key to promoting more of it. For example, “You are tasting the new food—Good job!”  Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment, such as a smile or hug.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the infant knows what to expect, like “If you behave in the store, you will get a treat on the drive home.” (If you XX, then I’ll XX.) It stops any negotiations in the heat of the moment.  A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your infant progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease an infant’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis (like in the grocery store checkout line and an infant is screaming. To avoid disaster, a parent offers to give them a treat if the infant will stop crying). While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions

• Recognize small steps along the way. Don’t wait for significant accomplishments—like the whole bedtime routine going smoothly—to recognize effort. Remember that your recognition can work as a tool to promote more positive behaviors. Find small ways your infant makes an effort and let them know you see them.
• Build celebrations into your routine. For example, after you’ve completed your bedtime routine, snuggle and read before bed. Or, in the morning, before you leave for work, take a few minutes to listen to music together.

Closing

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that grows your skills as an effective parent, which you can use on many other issues and essential skills that will last a lifetime. Throughout this tool, infants have opportunities to become more confident while growing their social and emotional skills.