Top Tips on How to Avoid Playing Favorites with Your Kids

If you happen to be a parent with multiple children, then you may want to know how to avoid playing favorites with your kids. The last thing a parent needs is more stress added to the already stressful environment of raising children. Making any one of your kids feel more important than another will do just that. Follow these tips and you'll be well on your way to solving the problem.

To begin, playing favorites will most often result in one or more of your children feeling like the other or others are more important than they are. This can ruin a kid's self-esteem, so be very aware of this fact.

On the subject of gifts - you may not give it much thought, but buying gifts more often for one child than another will create unwanted tension between siblings and ultimately between you and the child in question. Be sure to allow each child an equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of receiving a gift. If you continue to shower gifts more to one kid then another, the one who feels left out could easily foster a resentment towards you that can potentially become much more serious as the years go by.

Learning how to avoid playing favorites with your kids also comes down to the art of language. While each child has their own challenges from the parental point of view, it's important to try and keep your use of language as even as possible across your kids. If you have a boy and a girl, yes they are going to be very different, but how you speak to them can be identical. Fill your words with kindness and love - keep this the same no matter whom you're speaking to.

Not all children will achieve the same and have the same passions for sports or music, but the more you encourage this in all of your children, the more evenly raised your children will become.

And now for the dreaded, "well why can't you be more like your brother?" Yeah, many of us have heard that from our parents at some point throughout our life. Make sure not to fall into this trap. Kids don't want to hear how they could be better if they were only more like their sibling. Always deal with your kids on an individual basis - make sure never to compare them to a rival sibling.

If you're into the scolding thing, or the heavy discipline thing - even light discipline for that matter - make sure not to scold one child and not another if similar circumstances arise for multiple kids. This will immediately tell your kids that one of them is more important, or better, than the other.

Learning how to avoid playing favorites with your kids is not easy. However, if you can follow some of these tips it will become much more pleasant for everyone involved.