Anatoly Valenti celebrates the dad as a teacher. He has some ideas for men who enjoy and celebrate the process of shaping and developing beautiful human beings, their children.
—
Have you ever thought of who the best teacher is for your child? It is you! You as a parent are the ultimate teacher and mentor for your son or your daughter. Little kids are copycats and are looking to imitate adults. Thus, you more than anyone else, model the behavior of your children, you lead by example, and you shape the future habits and personality of your offsprings.
Habit is our second nature. Even most difficult tasks become easy and natural once they become your habits. Aristotle said, “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.” If you keep doing good things with your children, these good things will grow to be part of their characters. Essentially, good character is a collection of good habits. You may start forming your child’s good habits early on. One of such important habit to study and learn.
Listening: We all know that we should read to our children when they are little. Use this time to engage your child, make funny voices of characters, be an actor. Kids, among other things, form a habit and a skill of listening, paying attention, digesting and processing information.
Speaking: As your child starts speaking, it’s a good idea to have him retell the stories and fairytales that you read or simply recall and discuss what happened during the day. In our family we usually do this at bed time. Be patient and wait for the child to come up with words and show them that you are very interested in what they have to say.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeReading : Our son is four and we started private reading lessons. We formed a routine to read his ABC-book twice a day – before the daily nap and at bed time at night. He reads for no more than 5 minutes with his mom each time, and this already became part of an easy routine. Moreover, we make him feel that reading is really important. I often come into the bedroom and say that I want to listen how he reads. He is visibly happier when he sees how interested I am in his reading progress. He proudly says that dad wants to listen in. Sometimes I interrupt his reading exclaiming something like, “Really? I had no idea you can read such a difficult word…” Alternating reading paragraphs together is another useful technique we used with our daughter in elementary school.
Studying: Emphasize importance of being smart. Provide simple examples how the smart ones get more in life. Be consistent with homework. The first and foremost important task for our daughter since day one in elementary school was to do her homework. We set a goal of always completing every single assignment, which turned into a habit and translated into a straight-A student.
Critical thinking: As you do the homework with your child, remember that getting the correct answer and an A in class is not your primary goal. Your primary goal is to have your child understand why the answer is correct and how you arrived at that answer. Our public schools put a lot of emphasis on scores and grades, which does not always go hand-in-hand with developing critical thinking. You as a parent must fill this gap, which is a whole separate story.
Celebrate successes with your child, no matter how small. Whenever my 4-year old brings a craft from pre-school, gets a praise in class, does a new exercise in gymnastics, or does anything that deserves a praise, we never miss the opportunity to celebrate. We give a high-five and say we are proud of him. We get surprised and we pretend that we don’t believe that he could have done it himself. We say that only older kids can do that. We also say that he is a real man. And he loves to say, “Yes, I am a man!” Our reaction makes him feel happy and makes him want to do more.
We all aspire for our kids to become better than we are, to achieve more in life than we did, and to be happy. As we teach them, we in some way relive our childhood while being wise adults. Enjoy this process as you shape and develop your little loved ones into beautiful human beings.