How You Talk to Them During Everyday Moments
Research has discovered that parents actually have a lot of control over how and what their children recall. Parents who talk a lot to their children are more likely to have kids who recall memories with rich detail. It’s not about having deep philosophical conversations with your five-year-old.
Think about those moments when you’re folding laundry together or walking to the car. Adults play a significant role in helping children understand and remember. The most important role for adults is providing responsive, joyful, and nurturing interactions with children. Another important, yet simple way adults can help is by telling stories and narrating experiences, especially experiences they have shared with children. When you describe what you’re both seeing or doing, you’re essentially helping them build their memory bank.
For example, different parents will ask different numbers of memory-relevant questions, will try to elicit different types of memory, and will frame the discussions in different ways. Nelson (1992) describes two different parenting styles: pragmatic and elaborative. Pragmatic mothers use primarily instrumental instructions that are relevant to a task the child is performing, whereas elaborative mothers construct narratives with the child about what they and the child did together.
Your Emotional Reactions During Play Time
Our review revealed that increased harsh control during play interactions as well as a lack of parental responsiveness, warmth and sensitivity were found to be associated with increased behavioral problems. Moreover, the included studies indicated that positive affect expressed by parents during parent-child play was associated with fewer behavior problems. Kids are like emotional sponges during play.
The play situation is considered a save and controlled space in which children can learn to express their problems and to regulate their emotions, thus promoting emotional and behavioral adjustment. In early childhood, this process is thought to emerge in close interaction with caregivers. Parent-child play is thus viewed as an ideal window for parents to connect with their children and to support them in their social-emotional development.
Whether you’re genuinely enjoying building blocks or secretly checking your phone, they pick up on it. That genuine laugh when they show you their silly dance? They’ll remember the feeling of making you happy long after they forget the dance itself.
How You Handle Your Own Stress and Emotions
Six positive parenting behaviors and perceptions predicted average to above-average development on the Brigance screens. Conversely, <2 positive parenting behaviors and negative perceptions of children indicated child performance nearly 2 SDs below the mean on Brigance screens. Your emotional state becomes their emotional weather system.
Children exhibit internalizing and externalizing symptoms as a result of harsh, aggressive, and intrusive parenting. According to the data, it is seen that the risk of depression increases in adolescence. The risk of depression decreases in children whose mothers and fathers are cooperative and supportive.
When you take a deep breath before responding to their mishap, when you apologize after snapping at them, when you show them it’s okay to feel frustrated – these moments teach them more about emotional regulation than any parenting book ever could. Research reveals that chronic childhood stress can lead to a reduction in the size of the hippocampus, resulting in adults who are prone to overreacting to even minor stressors.
The Way You React to Their Mistakes and Accidents
Parenting offers support and care to the child in painful or stressful situations and gives confidence when the child is in non-distressing or non-stressful conditions. Sensitive parenting with young children provides an emotional climate for them. Supporting and sensitive parenting offers children security and confidence; parents promote reasonable regulations and self-initiation in social and non-social experiments.
That time they spilled juice all over the carpet, or when they accidentally broke your favorite mug? Your first reaction – the split second before you think about how you should respond – that’s what they remember. Did you get angry, or did you help them problem-solve?
Quality of instructions, animation, cognitive stimulation, physical care, parent-child synchrony, sensitivity, and positive responsiveness are dimensions of parenting and are interrelated with the child’s cognitive development. Mainly, research focuses on increasing parental support and responsibility to develop children’s cognitive abilities, thus providing sensitive caregiving effects on children’s cognitive development. They’re learning not just how to clean up messes, but how to handle life’s inevitable accidents.
Your Bedtime and Morning Routines
Findings mainly indicate that routines are associated with positive developmental outcomes in children, covering cognitive, self-regulation, social–emotional, academic skills, and overall mental and physical health. These studies suggest that establishing sleep routines can alleviate sleep problems in children, including those with developmental disabilities, and enhance sleep onset times and duration.
It’s not just about getting enough sleep. Routines, such as cleanup, can also help children form memory. By repeating behaviors, children’s knowledge base increases and becomes more organized. Through repetitive routines, children can fully process information. Responses are remembered and become more automatic.
The way you tuck them in, the songs you sing, whether you rush through the routine or take your time – these patterns become the soundtrack of their childhood. Research shows that kids from families with consistent routines show better emotional regulation and feel more secure in the world.
How You Talk About Other People
Children who possess basic social competence are able to develop and maintain positive relationships with peers and adults. Social competence, which is intertwined with other areas of development, also may include children’s ability to get along with and respect others, such as those of a different race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or economic background. Basic social skills include a range of prosocial behaviors, such as empathy and concern for the feelings of others, cooperation, sharing, and perspective taking, all of which are positively associated with children’s success both in school and in nonacademic settings and can be fostered by parents and other caregivers.
When you talk about the neighbor, your coworkers, or even characters on TV, your children are absorbing your attitudes. They learn empathy by watching yours, judgment by hearing yours, and compassion through your example.
That casual comment about someone being “weird” or your patient explanation of why someone might be having a bad day shapes how they’ll view human differences for years to come. An individual with healthy social and emotional functioning can experience, express, and manage emotions well, form and sustain positive social relationships, and adapt to social contexts effectively, which is essential for a person’s overall healthy functioning and mental health, especially among children and adolescents. Nevertheless, parenting and parent-adolescent relationships still serve as a significant shaping force in adolescent development.
Your Physical Affection and Presence
It doesn’t matter what you provide to your children as long as you give them pieces of your heart and your time. That’s what they’ll remember. Your physical presence speaks louder than words to a developing brain.
Our children won’t remember how many hours we spent holding them when they were sick or just inexplicably awake in the middle of the night. They wont remember the ridiculous pony tea-set game or how they desperately wanted the cat litter, but all those moments will find somewhere to settle in their brains. They may not be able to recall these but the memories are still teaching them they are loved and valuable.
The hugs you give without thinking, sitting close while reading, or just being physically available when they need you – these create what researchers call “secure attachment.” It’s the invisible foundation that helps them feel safe enough to explore the world.
How You Handle Changes and Transitions
Research shows that routines can benefit the mental health of children and adolescents in high-risk environments. For instance, family routines correlate with fewer behavior problems in children of Mexican-origin immigrants and reduced externalizing problems in adolescent girls facing cumulative risk factors. Routines also lessen psychological distress in adolescents experiencing physical and psychological abuse, delinquency in African-American adolescents from lower-resource homes, and children’s behavioral issues in families experiencing daily hassles.
Moving houses, changing schools, family changes – kids remember not just what happened, but how you handled it. Did you acknowledge their feelings? Did you maintain some familiar routines even when everything else was changing?
They result from and are enhanced by early positive and supportive interactions with parents and other caregivers. These early interactions can have a long-lasting ripple effect on development across the life course, whereby the function of one domain of development influences another domain over time. Your calm during their storms becomes their internal compass for handling life’s inevitable changes.
The memories that stick aren’t the Instagram-worthy moments or the expensive experiences. Retrospective memories of childhood experiences indeed predicted life outcomes, controlling for whether these experiences objectively occurred or not. Worth noting, objective occurrence of childhood experiences still predicted life outcomes, but retrospective memories were stronger predictors of self-rated health, cognitive impairment, mental health, and quality of social relationships. Thus, retrospective accounts and perceptions of childhood experiences may be, in some cases, more closely related to interpersonal behavior, health, and well-being in adulthood than the objective events that happen to individuals.
They’re the quiet Tuesday afternoons, the way you handled their scraped knee, the sound of your voice when you thought they weren’t listening. These seemingly small moments are actually the building blocks of who they’ll become as adults. The good news? You’re already creating these memories every single day.