Personal Development for Children
If you’re a parent, don’t miss an important opportunity to teach personal development skills to your children. This is typically overlooked in schools mainly eager to satisfy laws and regulations on what they are required to teach, and in achieving a good overall SAT scores. Of course it’s hard to teach something if you don’t know it yourself, and cannot teach by example. It undermines your effort it you don’t do what you preach.
I believe teaching self-esteem is one of the most important gifts you can pass on to your children. If they feel they are capable of doing anything, that will serve them well in most every life situation. Teaching self-esteem requires constant reinforcement and praise, not undermined by negative programming. Avoid saying things like “What’s wrong with you!”, you may mean it as an expression but a child can take it literally, thinking something may actually be wrong with them, that they are inferior in some way. Self-esteem is a whole topic in itself and there are many good articles on the subject, here’s one of ours.
Another important skill to help with is friendships. Understand how you build strong friendships and teach them how. For example, help them learn to be a good listener, to ask questions of people and truly be interested what they say. They need to learn how important honesty is, that trust is something very hard to recover once it’s lost.
Do you want your children to be a “the glass is half empty person” or a “the glass is half full person”? I hope the latter, if so they cultivate how to see the positive possibilities in everything. If you don’t practice it yourself, this will be hard to teach.
Above all know that you are a living example to your children of how to live and how to be a parent. It’s a big responsibility to be a role model like this, but one you choose when you have children, and you need to live up to it. As all parents know, there is only so much that you can do, and kids will choose other role models which you don’t approve of, however the stronger you can be as a positive role model the greater chance it will have an impact on them.
I could go on for a long time on this subject, however I encourage other parents to comment. I’m sure many of you have other ideas to share with others who are interested in bringing better personal development to their children.
Fantastic post! I think parents sometimes say stuff like that to their kids because they themselves have low self esteem and they don’t know any other way to establish respect. Thanks for the wonderful post.
Cheers,
Albert | UrbanMonk.Net
Modern personal development, entwined with ancient spirituality.
Chuck, it’s a shame that you even have to write about this topic. Building self esteem in our children ‘should be’ one of the top priorities for parents. For all those parents that don’t believe in depositing self esteem into their children, thank God for this article.
Good point Desmond, thanks for commenting. I would hope so, however I see so much low self-esteem in people I wonder. A very few times people have come into my son’s school and spoken on the subject but I wish there would be more of this. Sometimes kids unfortunately will listen more to outsiders than their own parents.
By the way, I wrote this post rather than Chuck ;-) Most of his articles show up only at http://www.personal-development.com/chuck/
Steve Moore
So Steve what can we as parents and leaders do do help our children realize that we have their best interest at heart? It seems as if kids have more influence on our kids than us parents. It shouldn’t be that way.
I definitely agree. Building the self esteem and confidence of my kids is my first priority. While I have goals to touch the lives of others, I believe it is important that the needs of my kids come first. As a parent, I would have failed miserably if I do not teach my own kids life coping strategies.
Evelyn
http://www.attractionmindmap.com
Good question Demond, I think if parents are sincere and consistent with teaching core values and beliefs, the children do understand we have their best interest at heart, even if they don’t admit it. However if we say one thing and do another, that just undermines everything, integrity and consistency is very important. For example if we’re going to teach them not to lie we cannot go around doing that ourselves. If we want to teach them to control their anger, we need to control our own. Same with self-esteem, they can sense if we lack it by observing how we handle situations. We can only do the best we are capable of in teaching core values and beliefs, setting a strong example, and hope that it withstands the negative influences from other children, adults, and media. I only wish more people in society took parenting more seriously. I’m no expert in parenting but this is my perspective.
You know Steve it sounds like we as parents need to raise our standards. If we hold ourselves to a higher standard and transfer that to our children, we are handing them a golden opportunity for the future. Life is hard for us all; but the more positive thoughts, beliefs and actions we have, the greater likelihood we will have successful lives. For my son’s life to be better than my own is my objective. As a parent, that should be a minimum requirement of parenthood.
HEY!
I totally agree with what you are saying here. something to add on what you have said, I think children are very prone to change, and it really depends how parents teach them. If the parents are train them to be positive, then they will be positive when they grow up. YES it is totally right!
Dennis,
http://www.dennisli.com
Great blog! We always need to remember we are a mirror for our children!
Hi Im Lee. Really enjoyed the article. I have just gotten married and my husband and i are trying for a child in the next few months. I have alot of fears and self esteem issues that were passed on by my mother to me and although i have moved beyond some of them, i still have a way to go. So i am currently doing everything i can to develop myself and move past any issues i have, so as i can be the best mother and role model to my future children as raise them to be well established successful happy human beings. I would love to share my journey with you in my personal blog.
I do think it all comes back by teaching by example. I often find that my children mirror for me things I need to learn for myself. And in the process of learning this myself, my children learn as well.
When I have been asked to counsel children, I have always offerned to counsel the parent instead. I feel that, where possible, the guidance and teaching best come from the parent. After all, I do believe that a particular child is with a particular parent for the reason of learning about life through them. And while the parent gains more insight into themselves and learns through their own wisdom (for example through couselling), this will affect the child as well.
Fantastic post on a far to often over looked aspect of parenting.