One of the more challenging parts of being a parent is being patient with our child’s behavior, especially if we are stressed or exhausted ourselves.

Patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without becoming angry or upset. 

Our ability to do this well as parents is influenced by our stress levels, tiredness & self-regulation skills.

Here are some practical tips to increase your patience with your kids:

1. Interrupt the build up 

On most days, by the time we lose our patience with our children, there has already been a long build-up of small moments where we have kept our patience. This is why we usually lose our patience towards the end of the day, or after a night of not much sleep.

This build-up is like a volcano building under the surface, that will erupt if you don’t interrupt it.

If you become mindful of the build-up, interrupt it by making a change – eg. start an activity everyone enjoys, have 20 mins of “quiet time” with everyone in their bedrooms, lock yourself in the bathroom for a few moments of quiet.

If you intentionally take a break or change your emotional state before you hit your breaking point, you will have far more internal capacity left over to regulate yourself.

2. Intentionally increase your serotonin levels

Some research has called serotonin the “patience effect”. Higher serotonin levels have been connected to higher levels of patience. This is particularly strong when the timing of the “reward” is unpredictable (meaning serotonin levels make the biggest difference when we have no clue when things might become good again).

So intentionally increasing your own serotonin levels naturally, will increase your patience levels with your children.

Serotonin levels increase with:

• Specific foods (eggs, cheese, pineapples, tofu, salmon, nuts & seeds, turkey)
• Light aerobic exercise
• At least 10-15mins of light exposure daily
• Massage
• Mindset refocuses: remembering happy moments, looking over special photos, planning future moments to look forward to.

If you are able to incorporate these serotonin activities into daily practices, they will have a positive impact on your patience levels with your children.

3. Quickly repair

When you lose your patience with your child (& it’s going to happen regularly in the normal days of parenting), be intentional to quickly repair the relationship.

All relationships have conflict. Relationships only become unhealthy when we don’t address the conflict and hurt.

To repair your relationship with your child:

• Take Responsibility for your actions (no matter what your child has done) – “I shouldn’t have yelled”
• Apologize – “I’m really sorry”
• Moving Forward – “I’m going to try to do better not to yell next time”

After you have repaired the relationship, you can then have a calmer conversation about your child’s behavior or changes needed.

Remember that there is simply no way to be a perfect parent, & raising children is a marathon that requires a huge amount of personal strength just to get through the day. Rather than beating yourself up for the moments where you “failed”, intentionally remind yourself of the moments where you stood in courage, capacity & strength.