Parenting is not for the faint of heart. There’s plenty of advice out there about correcting children’s behavior, but this one begins with suggestions for why and how mommy or daddy can work on their own beliefs and behaviors, and the kind of impact that will likely have on their kids.

Children need attention, affirmation, love with proper boundaries, an environment in which they can feel safe and be soothed, where they experience love from others of  different ages and backgrounds. Easy enough, right?

If only it were as simple as it sounds. Unfortunately, life is complicated and plenty of things stand in the way of kids getting what they need: hectic schedules, financial stresses, exhaustion, angry outbursts, and so on.

Even we parents ourselves can block our kids from the love they need. Part of this is because we once were kids who didn’t always get what we needed either.

There’s truth to the old adage that kids don’t do what they hear you say, but what they see you do. Oftentimes, what they see us do is similar to the things we saw our own parents do when we were young. If we do not become aware of our own patterns—of where our minds go in stress, and how we act toward our kids when they trigger us—then we may well end up passing on a great deal more than our genes and love. We’ll end up giving them our pain, too.

If you blow up about something in front of your child, it’s likely you learned that behavior of lashing out a long time ago, and it protected you against receiving additional hurt. Very often, intense negative emotions like anger, shame, panic, fear, disgust, and grief have been under the surface since we were children.

So sure, your child might be behaving “badly” and driving you up a wall, but try paying attention more to the buttons they are pressing and how those buttons became buttons in the first place. Most of the buttons your kids press came when you were little. As long as you are unaware of what’s rising up in you, you will probably play out your old childhood hurts that emerged from your own unmet needs. Unawareness will incapacitate you in the moments when your own child is needy and could use the same empathy your parents failed to give you.

So the first step to parenting well is examining ourselves as people who were once parented, too. Then we will develop awareness of what went wrong.

Keep an eye on the triggers your children activate in you. Be curious, rather than judgmental. Each of us has an inner critic that mercilessly reminds us of all our shortcomings—real and perceived. If you keep an eye on your internal critic, it’s less likely to come out on your children and yourself.

Keep an eye on the running dialogue you hold with yourself. For many people, it’s excessively negative—more so than most realize. Try suspending judgment on yourself—whether those judgments are positive or negative. Instead of saying “I’m good at soccer” or “Why am I still so disorganized?” try “My consistent practice has made a big difference” or “I’m better organized than I ever was, and I’ll keep learning.” When we stop taking our opinions about ourselves so seriously and stop clutching them so tightly, we will do less harm to ourselves—and therefore less harm to our kids. 

Raising a healthy child is impossible without a safe family environment. Many people take this to mean family structure, but research suggests that a better predictor than a certain family arrangement is how everyone in a given arrangement interacts. Are the interactions marked by love and acceptance, or stewing resentment? Are kids witnessing genuine love between their parents? When parents disagree (as they will), do children watch a respectful disagreement or do they watch their parents walk away more embittered than before? When parents choose not to stay together, do they speak poorly of their former partner to the child or choose to say the affirming things?

Home should be a sanctuary, and nothing provides that better than people getting along well. People close to a child are not just part of the child’s world—they are the child’s world. It would be great if every combination of parent, grandparent, care-taker, and close friend could create a world of peace and harmony at all times, but our own cantankerous, fretful, angsty parts make themselves heard, and our children’s worlds become like battlefields in some moments.

In a study of teenagers and parents, subjects were asked to rate how important they thought parents getting along was for rearing happy children. Seven in 10 teenagers said it was, but only a third of parents thought so. It’s hard for parents to take an honest look at their children’s discomfort and suffering—especially when you think you probably have something to do with it. This isn’t easy, of course. But if a good child-rearing environment begins in healthy relationships, then it’s imperative to understand your relationship with your co-parent and how that is affecting your children.

Loving, affectionate relationships are the lifeblood of a good environment for a child.  They help the child to feel secure, know the world is safe so they can take risks and trust that they have someone watching and supporting them.

Getting along well does not mean an absence of argument, however. It’s not bad to disagree. Disagreements inevitably come up in close relationships. There are ways to deal with these well and ways that are harmful. This might sound more like a point for couples than for parents, but it’s best when kids see their parents argue well: disagreeing while continuing to respect and appreciate each other.

Disagreements can deteriorate in a number of different ways. Sometimes couples volley facts back and forth until someone gets the final word. The goal stops being about repairing a rupture and more about scoring points. The “winner” doesn’t really win much of anything and the “loser” just feels resentment and embarrassment. The rupture gets bigger rather than smaller.

Sometimes couples throw in distractions. They will make a joke or bring up something more innocuous to avoid an argument. It’s like a pressure release valve whenever conflicts come up. Sometimes a distraction can be useful in the short-term if the moment isn’t right to hash things out, but as a long-term solution, this strategy will lead to a growing list of taboos and loneliness. The couple will miss out on intimacy, as well as the conflict.

Some people become martyrs. A martyr might tell his wife, “No, no, it’s fine. I’ll wash the dishes—again.” He does more than he believes he should have to in order to avoid conflict or to cause someone to feel guilty, and this is a recipe for bitterness.

If the bitterness grows over time, it can lead to a fourth way to disagree poorly, which is to change from martyr to tyrant. You attack, and, naturally, the other person retaliates.

These methods of arguing put children in an agitated, fight-or-flight mode. The world is no longer safe, and they lose trust, curiosity, and creativity as they are forced to redirect their energy toward self-preservation.

So what does good, healthy disagreement look like? How do parents argue well? It’s helpful to start small, with one thing at a time. Don’t dump a pile of grievances on the other. When you engage, make “I” statements rather than “you” statements. Saying “I felt upset when I came home and the dirty dishes were still in the sink” is preferable to “When are you going to start doing your part in keeping the kitchen clean?”  The focus of your statement is yourself, and it’s about sharing feelings rather than making judgments of “good” or “bad,”  on being understood and understanding, rather than winning an argument.

Of course, there can still be bitter rows even when these tactics are used. The goal is not to employ these methods in hopes of getting the desired response. That is manipulation. The goal is something deeper: connection. Arguing well is an opportunity to deepen the connection.

Is there no way out of the cycle of child-annoying-parent? It can feel never-ending, like everything you do only encourages it. There’s a story of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali running into a marble column when he was a boy. When Dali was pressed for an explanation as to why he ran into a sturdy, immovable object, he replied that no one was paying attention to him. Herein lies the key to understanding and breaking the cycle of behavior in our kids that we find unbelievably annoying.

When children don’t get what they need, feel unseen, or are not confident they will get the attention or affection they count on, they can get stuck in a rut of seeking attention until these feelings of insecurity have been resolved. This can lead to behaviors that many people would label “annoying.”

Parents are often worried they will spoil their kids by being overly responsive to their young children’s bids for attention and affection. But by generously giving of your time and attention in those critical early years, you teach your child that the world is safe, that their yearning for connection will be satisfied. Children who come to trust this will be far less likely to be attention-hungry later in life.

Characteristic of this early stage of attention seeking is the child’s perception that he or she is real only when someone sees them. So if a child gets stuck in this stage, he or she will become increasingly rowdy or subversive when the desire for attention keeps getting met with rejection or punishment for acting out or “being annoying.” Underneath it all is a bid for attention. In the child’s mind, negative attention is preferable over no attention because at least then the child feels “real.” This is why punitive measures will be ineffective in breaking the cycle.

Children who are throwing tantrums and acting outrageously are bidding (fiercely) for attention. Sometimes their tactics make them even more of a challenge to work with, but it’s when they’re most irascible that kids need attention the most. 

Parents often get locked into battles when they feel they cannot let their child “win.”But if you’d like to break the vicious cycle of attention seeking, try the tactic that psychologist Oliver James terms “love bombing”—where a parent sets aside time to be just with that child and allows the child the freedom to make the game plan. The child  decides where to go and what to do, and the parent will go along with it so long as it isn’t dangerous or illegal. Find a day and a place where you and your child can be alone and take every opportunity to shower your child with love and affirmation.

This is not spoiling your child. This is not rewarding so-called “bad behavior.” It is the best way to disrupt the cycle of parent and child each insisting on their way and then feeling wrung out and fed up with each other. Many adults remain stuck in the attention-seeking phase, and they experience intense shame or non-existence whenever they are alone. They tend to become manipulative or resign themselves to lack of connection. Things could have been very different for them if they had been love bombed when they were young.

The default mode for many parents is to be strict with their children. It’s the imposition of the adult’s will over the child’s in the desire to bring order to chaos. While very common, this approach does create difficulties. For one, children, like any other human, do not like being forced to do something. Being overly strict will lead to epic contests of will between parent and child, to viewing the parent-child relationship as one in which you’re either winning or losing, and to frustration. It might get short-term results, but it will lead to resentment in one or both parties, and it won’t cultivate an easygoing relationship with the child that parents ultimately want.

The overly strict parent risks inadvertently teaching the child to value being right and of avoiding blame. Excessive strictness also teaches a child to be rigid in the face of criticism. This can skew a child’s relationship to authority and hurt his or her ability to lead well as an older child or adult.

Parental strictness comes from a desire to encourage a certain set of behaviors and discourage another set. The tragedy is that being overly strict with our children is not the most helpful way to cultivate morality in our kids, or strong relationships with them.

Of course, being too lax carries its own problems. Boundaries that are too numerous and too rigid can stifle, but a lack of boundaries can leave a child feeling unprotected and insecure. Some parents who grew up with strict parents let the pendulum swing too far to the other side, which is just another form of allowing one’s parents to dictate one’s actions.

An alternative to both the strict and lenient approaches is a collaborative approach. Collaborating with your children makes you much more of a counselor than a monarch.

Collaboration begins by defining the problem. Let’s say the child’s room is messy. It’s important to define yourself and not the child when you lay out the problem. It’s preferable, for example, to say, “I would like this room clean, and I’d like you to clean it up.”

Then, watch for the emotions the comment elicits. Try to identify those emotions—out loud, for the benefit of the child. Most kids are going to need help putting words to their feelings. Give the child options. “Are you feeling sad because you think it might take a long time to do?” “Are you frustrated because you would rather do something else right now?” Eventually, kids will be able to express their own emotions to you. Cutting short the process here by strong-arming your child, instead of taking time to draw out the emotions, might get cleaner rooms in the short term, but it will create resentment in the long-term.

It is imperative to validate your child’s emotions—even if you feel differently about the situation. This is not spoiling a child or “giving in.” To say, “I can see why you’d feel that way” is choosing to “see” your child—something that the child wants even more than getting out of cleaning up the room. By considering his or her feelings, you can help your child learn to consider the feelings of others.

Then it’s time to work toward a solution. Resist the impulse to be snide or jump to the solution immediately when your child doesn’t produce a sterling suggestion. The idea is to build a can-do kid capable of finding solutions and compromising. Give your child a moment. Tell them why his or her plans might or might not work: “Never cleaning the room doesn’t work for me. Let’s think of something else.”

Finally, follow through as needed. You might have to revisit earlier steps.

For those who grew up in more authoritarian, parent-centered homes, the collaborative approach might seem painfully inefficient, but if the goal—more than pristine outward behaviors and a clean room—is cultivating strong relationships with our children and encouraging their development into self-assured, empathetic, flexible people, then the more collaborative approach is worth considering.