19 Aug Lifebook Parenting Values

• Lead by example.

Whatever beliefs you desire to instill in your children, to be effective your actions need to support the words you say to them.  Working towards becoming the best person you can be and setting great examples for your children can help you become the parent that you desire to be.  Your children will learn from your positive examples and will develop into happy, courageous, loving, and healthy people who contribute to bettering our society.  Can you really think of a greater reason to focus on your own personal development than for setting wonderful examples for future generations?

• Understand the importance of creating a proper environment for your children.

The environments, both physical and emotional, to which you expose your children will help define who they are today and who they will become in the future.  If, for example, you desire for your child to learn a sense of organization and responsibility you may want to work with them to clean up their toys rather than to clean up after them.  There are so many skills and values we want to teach our children so it is important to build these into a child’s daily environment and into the places they live and spend time.

• Take responsibility.

Many believe that it is a parent’s responsibility to teach their children about what is important in life.  Others believe that a parent’s responsibility is to teach their children how to think about and make their own decisions about what they believe is important.  Either way, there are many lessons that children just don’t learn in the classroom so  parents need to take some responsibility to ensure their children discover and understand.  Many schools simply do not have the tools and resources to teach some of life’s important lessons.   Some of the lessons we at Lifebook believe are better learned outside of the classroom through life experience are about dealing with money and about discovering foreign cultures through travel.  What lessons do you think your children could and should learn outside of a school classroom?  What steps can you take to help them to learn those lessons?

• Teach life values:

Values and morals can be deeply personal and are often better learned and taught in a highly personalized environment.  One way to teach your children your value system is to spend time thinking through, documenting and implementing your most important values and then also integrating them into your children’s lives.  It may be important to develop a clear idea of who each of your children are as individuals in order to tailor your parenting style to the specific child.   Every parent is different, and every child is different, so every parenting style will be different.  Having already thought through your ideal parenting strategies and working everyday to put them in action is a great starting point for teaching your children the values you would like to impart on them.

Some examples of values you might consider passing on to your children are:

• Independence

Consider teaching your children how to think, instead of what to think.  This can be accomplished by finding ways to encourage independent thought and creativity.  You can instill independence in a child by slowly allowing them to make some of their own decisions, and by supporting them to take responsibility for their choices and any related consequences.

• Health

Each person has their own idea as to what health means to them and reasons for why they desire to achieve their chosen level of health. Teach your children about your values regarding health of the body, mind and spirit.

• Happiness

Most everyone wants to have a significant amount of happiness in their lives.   Happiness doesn’t always come easily and can sometimes take consciousness and discipline to create and maintain.  While everyone has different genetic inclinations for happiness, a child’s environment can also instill safety and happiness for a lifetime.  Consider working to create a happy environment in which your children can thrive.   Incorporate fun into your daily routines and ensure that laughter, love and comfort are built into your children’s worlds.

• Courage

In order to manifest courage in a child you can teach them to understand that there is nothing bad about failure.  It is not trying or not having the courage to try that will place limits on their dreams. Consider showing your children that they can learn from their failures and that having the courage to get back up on that bicycle after falling and then finally riding off without your help is an amazing metaphor for achievement and success in life.

• Parenting with purpose

As in so many areas of life great parenting often results from defining a focused and intentional parenting strategy.  It is important to understand the person who your child is as an individual; what are some of their innate characteristics that make them different from every other child? What are their areas of strength and, alternatively, areas for development?  Once you have thought deeply about your children you can envision some of the broader aspects of where life might take them and the skills and values they may need to develop.  It is then that you will have the opportunity to purposefully guide your child to become an amazing person.