Calm  is a word that means serene, unruffled, patient, and collected. It's not easy to stay cool, especially so if you have children. 

In order to prevent a fight, parents will often do one of three things:

• enforce their wills,

• retaliate, or

• withdraw.

While those tactics may provide immediate gratification for the parent, they aren't the foundation for forming a loving, long-term relationship.  The best way to have a positive impact on our kids is to gain their trust and make them willing, if not necessarily overjoyed, to follow your lead.

When we parents get anxious, agitated and shouty, there can be a few negative consequences for our children. These can be avoided by taking a calm and consistent approach to parenting. Here are a few negatives that can be overcome by being a calm, regulated and unruffled parent. 

• Not being a leader - a parent who is unwilling to take the lead, and who constantly ‘gives in’ to their child let them lead in the relationship. While it is really important to give children the opportunity for decision making for themselves and make their own choices, sometimes parents can relinquish their own leadership role in order to have an easy life. This can be done by either being permissive, or losing control of our emotions and threatening punishment that is either disproportionate or a consequence which is either unnatural or not followed through. Parenting in this way undermines a child's trust in the parent as a responsible and trustworthy caregiver and a trustworthy person in authority. It causes a lack of trust where the child wonders how and why they should trust you if you are so unstable, unpredictable or unreliable. Parents must be role models for their children.

• If we allow the child to constantly engage in stressful and dysfunctional interactions with family, friends or online, they learn to always be on the defensive, and that every conversation is a conflict, and that every conflict needs to be angry, aggressive, something to be won, or just completely soul-destroying. If this is how we as parents engage with others, or if we live in a constant state of anxiety, our children will follow our style. They need to be aware that they don’t have to deal with things alone, especially when it comes to change - not in a ‘helicopter parent’ or controlling way, but as parents who calmly get involved and help them negotiate the big confronting issues that life inevitably brings.

• Reinforcing a child’s negative core beliefs. If we do this, the child believes that our anger and disapproval confirms that they are a bad kid and don’t deserve love. As parents, we must express love in a consistent and on a non-performance based way.

• Don’t put unrealistic expectations of behavior and maturity onto young shoulders, and don’t fall into the trap of rewarding compliance. The child will feel that perfection is the goal that they cannot reach, or seek a ‘prize’ for certain behavior without being motivated to do the right thing for the sake of just doing the right thing. Parents must convey expectations to their children on a regular basis and keep them accountable in a caring manner.

• By maintaining an antagonistic and emotionally distant connection, you are feeding into the child's uneasiness with, and desire to avoid, emotional closeness. The child will believe that they can wear you down and be left alone to do what they want, and as long as you are upset at each other, you can both withdraw and not deal with the relationship. As parents, we must communicate in an unruffled and clear way with our children on a regular basis.

Parents who set a constant example of calmness encourage their children to also reciprocate with calmness and even behavior over time, giving them the space to feel more secure in their relationships and to also have room to think clearly and learn effectively and without panic.