Learning All About Parenting Hero: A Guide

For that reason, I recommend doing each of the game's 15 challenges at least three times, choosing a different response on each occasion, so that you can extract the maximum possible wisdom from this insightful little app. It won't take you long, and it could do you and your kids a world of good.

As a parent, here are two of the key insights I drew from Parenting Hero.

Nearly all of the right answers in Parenting Hero involve demonstrating to your child that you're paying attention to them, and not just delivering platitudes. In the first challenge, When a Child Wants Something He Cannot Have, this means merely acknowledging that your child likes dogs and is sad about not being able to own one due to an allergy. Accepting a child's feelings makes it easier for the child to accept them too.

In another, When Food Becomes a Fight, you respond to your child's reluctance to eat his favorite meal by explaining that he's just not in the mood for it today, thus avoiding a binary conflict. Unfortunately for the child, there's no alternative dinner, but acknowledging his feelings makes this restriction tolerable.

Acknowledging feelings can be challenging when a child appears to be in the wrong. In the scenario When Children Fight, an older brother hits his little sister for breaking one of his toys. It's only possible to reach a resolution that allows the brother to make genuine amends to his sister by acknowledging that the loss of his spaceship was genuinely upsetting to him.

Even in low stakes situations, demonstrating that you're paying attention makes a difference. In the scenario How to Praise Your Child's Masterpiece, a simple, "wow, what a nice picture!" doesn't cut it. Instead, the correct response involves describing the picture and explaining your favorite parts. Similarly, in the next scenario, When a Child Performs, it's crucial to tell how the child's performance as Tigger made you feel and which things about it stood out.

In short, kids aren't any more satisfied with stock responses than you are.

Parenting Hero contains several scenarios in which most parents would flip their proverbial lids and feel that doing so was the appropriate response. The aforementioned When Children Fight is the most obvious example - if I caught one of my children hitting the other one, I would probably feel it was my solemn duty to unleash fire and brimstone. But this wouldn't help them to understand what they had done wrong, or encourage them to make amends.

Most of the examples are not this extreme, but there are still several instances where some parents might be tempted to snap when a more emollient response would be more useful.

For example, When a Child Won't Clean Up, gives you the option of scolding your child for being messy or passively mentioning that there are blocks all over the floor. Stricter parents may balk at the 'correct' answer, but in fact, this allows you to initiate a game whereby the child happily races against time to tidy away the blocks. Surely this is the best possible result.

Not a single one of the resolutions in Parenting Hero involve shouting, and this makes perfect sense when you watch the scenarios being played out and read the explanations. Children, like adults, find it harder to do the right thing when they are busy defending themselves or counter-attacking. If cool heads prevail, everybody wins.