Help your pregnant daughter with: Improving Parenting Skills

The other day we posted about the topic "How much should parents help their pregnant single daughter?"We've received this question is various forms. Another way this has been phrased is "How does a mom support her pregnant daughter?" Keywords we've seen on our statistics include phrases like "helping your pregnant daughter." That post focused on the minimum basics of safe housing, nutrition, and medical care. Today let's talk about some other help beyond the minimum basics.

Beyond the minimum basics of housing, nutrition, and medical care, parents of a pregnant teen or college student should consider how they might help with these goals:

1. Helping your daughter remain in school until graduation.
2. Preventing subsequent adolescent pregnancies.
3. Improving parenting skills. (Today's topic)
4. Locating and using community resources.
5. Stabilizing family support systems.
6. Strengthening employability skills and efforts to become economically self-sufficient.

Again, your motive of considering these kinds of help is not to reward your daughter's sexual activity and pregnancy outside of marriage, but to help get her on the road to independence and to help give your grandchild a better start in life. Today's topic is:

3. Improving parenting skills. Being a parent, you know that parenting can be frustrating at times, humorous at times, and exhausting at times. Teens who have not had extensive babysitting experience may not realize how tiring it is to supervise children. Teens who have done extensive babysitting may not realize that parenting is not always fun and games like it can be when caring for someone else's children for a few hours.

Help your pregnant teen or college student learn the parenting skills they need. Your local pregnancy help center may have a series of classes that covers infant care (bathing, feeding, etc.), child development (physical, emotional, mental), and parental coping skills (budgeting, time management, etc.). Other sources for these classes include local hospitals, schools, community centers, social services, churches, and other non-profit organizations.

Skills your daughter needs to develop as a parent:

1) Patience. Infants, toddlers, and children can all test a parent's patience in various ways.

2) Anger management. As children grow, they are constantly testing their boundaries. When parents lose their patience, they may become angry. Parents must learn to manage their anger so that they do not act abusively.

3) Communication. Infants start with very limited communication skills: basically, crying. After a few months infants learn to smile and laugh. As infants grow they learn to make speech sounds, but aren't yet speaking words and certainly not sentences. Your daughter needs to learn about the phases of communication her child will grow through and how she can communicate with her child at each phase.

4) Listening and responding. Listening skills are definitely part of communication, but they deserve special notice. True listening is not something we do naturally... it takes training to really listen instead of just wait until you can start talking. Likewise, responding is more than just waiting until you can get a word in edgewise. There is a difference between reacting and responding. Your daughter needs to learn how to respond, not react.

4) Health care. Your daughter needs to learn about how to take care of her child. She needs to be able to recognize sickness, how to handle accidents and injuries, and when she should call the doctor. Your daughter needs to follow through with immunization appointments for her child. Your daughter also needs to take care of her own health. For example, if your daughter becomes depressed after giving birth, she will have a difficult time being a good parent.

5) Teaching. Your daughter is a teacher for your grandchild... she teaches everything from reading to how to handle emotions to the difference between right and wrong.

6) Discipline. Discipline should be teaching, not punishment. Infants are not able to know the difference between right and wrong. Parents need to learn about appropriate discipline at each stage of their child's growth, and how to express discipline with love not anger. Responding (not reacting) skills are important in discipline.

7) Coping skills. Sometimes everything just gets overwhelming. How does your daughter cope when she is overwhelmed? Does she drink alcohol? Yell? Hit? All parents need to learn about how to cope with the frustrations of life.

8) Decision-making skills. As a parent, your daughter will be making hundreds of decisions a day. Some are small (what to wear), some are big decisions. Parents need to learn how to make decisions in a reasoned way, not merely following their emotions of the moment.

Learning how to be a good parent takes time. After all, the child keeps growing into new phases of development, which means a parent has something new to learn! Your daughter needs your help learning about good parenting skills. Help her find books, classes, support groups, and other resources that can help her become the best parent possible.