Parent-Child Relationship: 10 Ways to Build Connection

Children are more open to adult influence when they feel a sense of connection, bonding, and caring. Building that strong parent-child relationship is primarily the adult’s responsibility.

When children feel connected to us, they are more likely to listen, learn, share what is happening in their lives, and allow us to influence them. Connection creates the emotional safety for cooperation, resilience, and healthy development.

Why Connection Comes Before Influence

In an ideal world, children would experience close physical contact, attachment, and bonding from birth onward. But life doesn’t always cooperate. Illness, financial stress, family disruption, separation, divorce, mental health challenges, cultural expectations, and other difficult situations can interfere with the parent-child relationship and disrupt a child’s basic need for connection and security.

When this happens, it is important for both your sake and your child’s to pay attention to these disruptions and choose to rebuild connection. Assuming you are able to provide good-enough parenting, here are some ways to strengthen your relationship and bring out the best in your child.

Research for Parent-Child Relationship

Research from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child emphasizes the importance of responsive, back-and-forth interactions between children and caring adults. These “serve and return” interactions help build the foundation for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development.

10 Ways to Build a Loving Relationship With Your Child

1. Listen With Empathy

Help your child develop authenticity by listening with empathy rather than correcting, advising, or judging.

When children have the experience of being heard, they develop greater awareness of their own thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. Your curious, compassionate listening communicates: “What you feel and think matters to me.”

2. Stay Present When Your Child Is Angry

Anger can be difficult for adults to tolerate, but it can also provide an opportunity for  connection. Anger often communicates, “Something is hurting me. Will you respond to my hurt?”

When children cannot safely express what they feel, they may move toward disconnection. Our job as adults is not to eliminate their feelings of anger but to stay present, help them feel understood, and look beneath the anger for the primary emotion.

Anger is often a secondary emotion. Underneath it may be fear, hurt, loneliness, disappointment, or frustration.

3. Teach the Difference Between Anger and Aggression

Help your child understand that feeling angry is not the same as behaving aggressively. Anger can be a powerful source of energy. It can motivate us to solve problems, set boundaries, speak up, and challenge injustice. Children need to learn that their feelings are acceptable while some behaviours are not.

4. Encourage Empathy and Kindness

Help your child consider how their actions affect other people. You might ask:

“Imagine how [name] would feel if you did that.”

Rather than simply telling children to be kind, help them develop the ability to imagine another person’s experience.

5. Help Your Child Know Where It Is Safe to Be Vulnerable

Children need to learn that not everyone is equally safe to trust with their personal thoughts and feelings. This is especially important for boys. Many sensitive boys entering peer groups between approximately five and seven years old may encounter teasing, shaming, bullying, or rejection when they show vulnerability.

We don’t want boys sacrificed to a culture that denies them the right to feel hurt, sad, scared, or vulnerable. Create a safe place at home where your child can express those feelings without shame.

6. Create a Shame-Free Relationship

Shame is sometimes used by adults to control children. But shame can damage connection and make children hide rather than communicate. Create a shame-free zone where your child knows they can bring difficult feelings to you. You might say:

“With me, you can tell me how you feel. You don’t have to hide your feelings from me.”

You can set limits on behaviour while still accepting the feelings.

7. Develop Courage

Notice and acknowledge the courage it takes for your child to speak the truth, admit a mistake, stand up for someone else, or remain true to their values. Instead of focusing only on achievement, recognize qualities such as honesty, courage, compassion, persistence, and integrity.

8. Teach Awareness and Respect for Differences

Help your child become aware of differences in sex, religion, culture, power, privilege, opportunity, and life experience.

Teach children to notice differences without automatically judging them. A strong parent-child relationship provides a safe foundation from which children can explore a world that may be very different from their family experience.

9. Build on Your Child’s Strengths

Look for what your child does well and help them build on those strengths. Children develop confidence when adults notice more than their mistakes and weaknesses. Ask yourself: “What strengths do I see in this child that they may not yet see in themselves?” Then tell them.

10. Encourage Critical Thinking About Culture and Media

Encourage your child to question the messages they receive from television, movies, video games, social media, advertising, and popular culture.

Talk about stereotypes, violence, discrimination, and sexism. Point out examples of both females and males being portrayed as strong and vulnerable. Help your child understand that strength does not require hiding feelings or denying vulnerability.

Helping Boys Stay Connected to Their Vulnerability

Boys need connection just as deeply as girls do. Here are some ways adults can support that connection:

• Give your boy the experience of empathy.
• Encourage him to develop listening skills.
• Help him stay connected to his vulnerability. Create a safe place where he can talk about fear, loss, sadness, and hurt.
• Help him learn to accommodate other people’s needs. Healthy relationships require mutual influence. Boys need to know that it is okay to listen to and learn from others, including girls and women.

A willingness to listen and be influenced is not weakness. It is a key part of a healthy relationship.

A Note About Adult Relationships

The importance of listening and being open to another person’s concerns doesn’t end when children grow up.

One commonly cited indicator of marital distress is a pattern in which a partner repeatedly refuses to listen or respond to the other’s complaints. The same principle applies throughout life: connection depends on our willingness to listen, seek to understand, and be influenced by someone we care about.

Helping Girls Develop Confidence and Competence

As girls approach adolescence, social and cultural messages can contribute to self-doubt and concerns about appearance and acceptance.

Help your daughter maintain a strong sense of competence by:

• Acknowledging her strengths, skills, ideas, and accomplishments.
• Emphasizing what her body can do rather than focusing primarily on how it looks.
• Encouraging her to take healthy risks and develop confidence in her abilities.

Let her know that her worth is not determined by her appearance.

Connection Helps Children Learn and Grow

The power of connection extends beyond the parent-child relationship.

Rita Pierson’s well-known TED Talk, “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” emphasizes the importance of relationships between children and caring adults. Her message is simple and powerful: children are more able to learn when they experience genuine connection with the adults who teach and support them.

Research on children’s relationships and development has similarly highlighted the protective value of having at least one supportive adult in a child’s life, particularly for children coping with adversity such as poverty, abuse, parental separation, divorce, or parental mental illness.

The Bottom Line is ‘Connect’

You don’t have to be a perfect parent to build a strong parent-child relationship. You need to be present, curious, caring, and willing to repair the relationship when things go wrong.

Children who feel  connected to the important adults in their lives are more likely to accept guidance and influence. Before asking, “How can I get my child to listen to me?”, it may be worth asking:

“How connected does my child feel to me?” Connection: comes before correction and influence, buildsresilience.

How Do You Create Meaningful Connection With Your Child?

What do you do to help the child or children in your life feel seen, heard, valued, and cared for?

I’d love to hear your ideas and experiences.

Please check out these related posts:

• Protective Factors to Boost Children’s Resilience, You Need to Know
• Give Your Children Unconditional and Conditional Love