Sangita Kafle

When your little kid triggers you, do you respond as an attentive adult or just the way your parent treated you when you were a kid? Do not you feel that it is the time to discipline your kid or transform and reset your behaviour as a parent?
Parenting is a divine experience. Children are amazing little beings, full of potential and perfect at birth. Parenting is to promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting is about the intricacies of raising children, which is a continuous learning process. It becomes one of the challenging journeys. And a joy ride, too. From the very moment one conceives a baby to raising a kid, she/he comes across many challenges. Parental attachment and the bonding do not just come up naturally. It takes plenty of time and effort.
Forming Attachment
Forming an attachment with your children may involve holding and hugging them, providing them with a safe living environment, communicating with them, laughing and playing with them. Also, managing their sleep routine, catering to them with nutritious meals and eating with them, having only proper expectations for them and setting boundaries and understanding their body language and their sign language and their expressions (i.e. facial expressions, sounds they make, how they communicate their needs) too may require to form attachment.
If we want to develop a healthy bond with our kids and set limits for their safety, the process begins from you first as a parent. Throughout the day, emotions are constantly changing–happy to sad, sad to frustrated, annoyed to angry. The list goes on. You cannot deal with your kid when stressed. So before you do anything with your kid, follow this steps — walk out of the room, take deep breaths, count up to 10 and take a sip of water or listen to music.
Now, coming to a child, he may have his level of meltdowns like screaming, whining or aggression. Our precious little bundle of joy does not know how to manage such high-intensity emotions.  Moreover, such emotion signals our children need a deeper connection, not suppression or punishment. Any effort to suppress such meltdown will cause weakening the parent-child bonding. Practice, patience, and persistence are key to resolve this.
Quick-fix techniques like distracting with food or alluring with new toys might do the work, but they are not a permanent solution. A child will have another pretext to get triggered again. But if we sit and listen carefully, asking if he's okay, our attention allows them to open up.  These steps address our emotional problems. As a parent, we should assure that our children feel safe to show us their feelings.
Child screaming is about decibels he can reach. And the effects on his audience. A child soon understands how much power they have in their screaming. The body language is often upfront and direct. A simple message that your child is very sad and needs your help to cope with the rush of emotions. That moment, amid an emotional meltdown, is when the genuine connection should happen. And maybe that big screaming stops our lives.
Now, here comes the million-dollar question of how to respond to emotional meltdowns to raise strong kids which every parent's struggles. So what is the best way to cool down the situation without clamping down the emotions? These techniques might be helpful:
As a parent, we always want to discipline our kids to never become fussy. But it is not possible if we lack consciousness and clarity of mind. Because with depleted energy, the charge of settling a cranky child cannot happen. They need our genuine presence, our love, and hugs, a calm attitude with lots of listening. The best measure is to stay calm in crises, which can tame emotional responses well. So, as a parent, we need to allow our self a brief space before formulating any responses. We need to raise ourselves as a parent first if we want to raise a conscious child.
So next time, we set out to settle down a meltdown of our kid, let's get our self some fresh air. A deep breathe and clear our head and start our plan of action mindfully and calmly. 

Identify Children's Emotion 
As a parent, we cannot say that this emotion of our child is valid, and this is invalid. All emotion of our child is fair and as real as they can be. Here our role as a parent is to not judge them but understand and embrace when they came up. And help and try to manage such emotions with different tools and techniques.
If we misunderstand our child’s emotions like irritation, our response is most likely to be tiring or even worse followed by scolding or some harsh behaviour on our kid. And, if we run away from such events, our poor little kid would feel abandoned. If we ask our child to be quiet and stop crying, the child will perceive that we should suppress such a strong feeling, which is a very unhealthy way of managing a meltdown and has a longer impact on our child's mental development.
Any bad behaviour results from miscommunication between parents and children. So, instead of punishing the child, we need to look beneath the behaviour to understand the intentions that will further help gradually strengthen the parent-child bonding. Children crave our love and acceptance. They need to know we love and value them no matter what emotion they are facing. If we love only a happy child that means we only half love our child.

Anxiety Is Real
A child might feel anxious more often than a normal adult might because kids are more vulnerable because of less maturity. As a result, they suffer from more anxiety. According to the American Psychological Association, "Anxiety is an emotion characterised by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure". But this is not something to worry about, as it is completely normal. But parents should not leave it unaddressed.
Toddlers may face separation anxiety, also called separation anxiety disorder(SAD), as early as they start pre-schooling. To tackle this as a parent, we shouldn't be overprotective and should leave kids once in a while in a safe and secured environment. And stop scaring kids with darkness, ghosts, and horror. 
We over praise our kids, thinking they might give their best. We need to be very careful about over praising, as it has consequences. Normally, parents say pleasant things to increase the self-esteem of their kids. When a kid loses a game or when they are not in, the lead gets in their head and their ego gets inflated.
Which will cause bigger meltdowns. Proper child development requires our kids to understand that there is always an opportunity to succeed and chances of failure.
The healthy way is they understand that there is a struggle in every step to get the job done. We should teach them that nobody is perfect and be strong to face obstacles. We need to encourage our kids, celebrate their progress, no matter how small it is, but not make a big deal out of it that our child pays the price. As Dr Shefali says, “Don't shield your children from pain, shield them from the belief that the obstacles they face in life will break them.”

Listening Is Helpful
To listen well, and to view our kid's meltdown mindfully, first, we need to hear our feelings. A proper network of other parents can be a forceful way to support each other. Such networking might help not to lose out our temperament with our children.
Today we are raising Gen-next kids and we understand our parents were not perfect, nor are we. We cannot just rely on what our parents taught us and what we feel is right. It is high time we realised that even our parents could have their trauma and baggage, which they subconsciously transferred to us. And, in no way we should pass that emotional trauma to our kids. T
To be a conscious parent, we must first acknowledge our fear, anxiety, and childhood trauma.  Such self-realisation will work as a circuit breaker and thus paves the path of generational healing. We need to listen to our kid without an opinion or judgment. We should listen to understand them. There is nothing more appropriate than the profound way of communication and connection that will lead to the wellbeing of our kid and make our child a peaceful one.
So, these are some tips which might help to maintain a cordial parent-child relationship. Otherwise, in today's world of smartphones and the swiftly growing social networking age, things can go worse if not addressed correctly on time.
Connect Deeply
A child is the first one to realise when we are not attuned at when we are with them. We need to live in the small mom ents with our kids and be present with them, not only physically but emotionally and mentally. When we connect deeply to our children, without expectation, ego, or fear, we allow them to evolve into their most authentic selves. As Dr Shefali says, “When children know their parent would accept for who they truly are, they will fly free.”
We need to allow our child to live in the present moment as a creative being and encourage them to find their way.
I believe we should not showcase their trophies on social media and try to make them our puppets. Every child is worthy and unique which we must acknowledge. For every parent, a child is a superstar from the day of his/her birth. They are extraordinary in their ordinariness.

(Kafle writes on social issues.
Email: kafle_sangita@hotmail.com)