Who has an influence on your child’s decision-making?
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“If you don’t pass your values on to your kids, someone else will.” —celebrated thought leader Frank Sonnenberg
Dads have a vital role to play in their child’s development. No longer are dads expected or happy to just sit at the fringe. We want to be INVOLVED in every part of our children’s lives.
Being involved isn’t just about helping to make more decisions. It also means being a leader for your child, and that means setting the example in how they are raised.
In my work at DaddiLife.com, I talk with dads about their hopes, dreams, worries, and questions. We’re using our time with dads to feature and share some of the most powerful principles that we see you guys striving for.
Starting with Values
What are your core values? It’s a big question, and while many fathers know and understand the values they are passing on and how they are doing it, we can sometimes feel that we are living in a world that seems to care more for ‘value’ than ‘values.’ In this context, it can be easy to assume that holding ourselves and others to values simply isn’t important anymore.
Well, you are not going to make that mistake. As a dad, you can’t make that mistake, because so depends on your decision.
Why Influence Matters
The subject of ‘influence’ is one of those areas that gets hotly debated, and with the rise of social media ‘stars’ we hear a lot about how ‘influential’ relative strangers can be. That phenomenon, mixed with increasing speeds at which online information can pass between people, means the sorts of messages that our children grow up receiving can be contradictory, reactionary and, at times, inflammatory.
Those values and principles are the guidelines you want your child to reference when making their decisions.
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We need to think of values as a cloak of armour and guiding light – the kind of protection and security that our children can get from their dad’s leadership, giving them the type of principles that means they feel safe, secure and knowledgeable enough to dissect the picture so they can see clearly.
In a week where we’ve seen people have instant regrets over important decisions, we need to provide the type of values that give our children the confidence in their decision making that lay ahead, in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
Finding Your Core Values
For those not sure what exactly their values are, here are some useful questions to ask yourself on this journey:
- What beliefs do you care about (such as manners, straight-talking, courtesy, honesty etc) so much so that you would say you feel at minimum ‘very strongly’ about them?
- What principles would others around you say you have? (Hint if you don’t know, why not ask? But ask for the good and the bad.)
- If we then asked you to cut that list to just 2-3, what would be the most important to you?
And most importantly . . . why are those the most important?
Not everyone is going to get all of these perfect—perfection is not the goal. The goal is to have a set of values and principles ready to teach your child and to be comfortable teaching them. Those values and principles are the guidelines you want your child to reference when making their decisions, as they make their mark on the world.
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A version of this article was originally published on the author’s website, Daddilife.com and is republished here with his permission.
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More on identifying your core values on GMP
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Photo credit: Flickr/Charlie Marshall