During your child's preschool years, his or her personality will start to become more pronounced. Even though your child's personality will naturally start to grow, it is important that you help guide your child towards more positives traits, such as treating others with respect. Here are some ways that you can reinforce positive personality traits and help your child recognize more negative ones. 

Encourage Your Child to Play

During play time, your child will have an opportunity to interact with other children. The interactions can be instrumental in helping your child learn about how to resolve conflicts, decision-making, and how to respect others. Your child also has a chance to learn the importance of standing up for himself or herself. 

Help Your Child Identify Emotions and Their Causes

One of the skills your child needs to develop is the ability to identify emotions. By doing so, your child can learn to recognize what actions lead to which emotions. This can not only be useful to your child, but it can also help him or her understand how actions can affect others. 

As a parent, you can rely on non-verbal clues to help your child identify emotions. For instance, if your child cries out in anger after a sibling upsets him or her, you can verbalize what happened for the child. Verbalizing the emotion and the reason for it will help your child to do it the next time he or she is upset. 

Reinforce Positive Behavior

A good way to reinforce positive behavior in your child is to be consistent in the praise and encouragement that you offer him or her. Sometimes, you need to go above and beyond offering simple praises. For instance, if your child builds a sandcastle, not only should you tell him or her how great it is, but ask questions about it. Questions about the design and what he or she was thinking while building it can help convey your opinion of the sandcastle. 

You should also celebrate small acts of goodness that your child does. Do not wait to notice your child until he or she does something wrong. For instance, if your child remembers to brush his or her teeth without prompting, thank your child for doing so. 

A good resource for finding other ways to help your child develop positive personality traits is a child development center, like Small World Early Learning & Development Center. The staff can not only give you tips you can use at home, but help you identify behaviors on which to focus.