The world rewards so many behaviors that we don’t teach our kids. We hold onto a naive, perhaps a bit charming, view that the world should operate like our family or a household. It does not.
If you are a parent, consider what skills are highly valued in the world you want your children to thrive in and determine if you are helping them foster those skills. With good intentions, you might be suppressing them.
Here is a list of things you should start to teach and reward, instead of neglect or punish.
Negotiation
I get it, you can’t stand it when your kids reply to a demand with, “Can I do it later?” Many kids are notorious for coming up with a plan B that better suits them.
You should silently applaud them.
What makes it difficult to do so is that most kids are bad negotiators, so it’s hard to entertain their efforts, let alone praise them. But bad negotiators can only get better when they are given opportunities to practice and reflect — and when their good negotiation gets rewarded.
Yes, yes, your family isn’t a democracy. Nor should it be an autocracy. But even if you feel the need to get your way all of the time, you can still teach your kids this valuable skill. The first rule of negotiation is, after all, getting what you want while making your opposite feel like their interests were served.
If your child objectively wins a negotiation, you might be tempted to punish her for it because it will come at your expense.
Resist the urge to get caught up in the trenches of the particular negotiation and take a more distant view of your child’s ability to negotiate. What are you trying to accomplish? And what can your child learn from the experience?
And by darn, when they negotiate well compliment them. Heck, even reward them! When they negotiate poorly, review it and teach them how to improve.
Arguing
The one thing that might drive you more nuts than a serial negotiator is an argumentative child. Again, it’s hard to see a positive here sometimes because children and adolescents make cringeworthy and sophomoric arguments. And by definition, an argument aginst you is a challenge to your authority.
But good argumentation is a useful skill that should be developed through encouragement and practice. Of course, there are good-faith arguments and bad-faith arguments. Some arguments are productive and others are destructive. You can be the master your young apprentice needs, teaching him logic, credible evidence, and how to not let emotion overtake him.
Set up some time to discuss what things are appropriate to argue about. Talk about arguing when you’re not in an argument. Start by talking about an argument in which you might have done better and let them critique you.
Then let them practice. This will take patience because they will either practice on you or on a sibling, in which case it can spiral into full-scale hostilities.
But be patient, enforce the rules, and teach.
Perhaps you need a bit of work on your own argumentation. What a perfect way to hone them while connecting with your child on a more sophisticated level.
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The Utility of Money
Many of you might think money is the root of all evil. You might rightly worry about getting your kids hooked on money at too young an age, which might jade them for the rest of their lives.
But you know what? Your children will develop a view of money and its value with or without you. You might as well guide them.
Children transitioning into adulthood often learn those lessons the hard way — when they don’t have enough money and they fall into massive debt. Or after they make a spectacularly bad money decision. Better to get them used to earning, spending, and saving at a young age. Let them make dumb decisions with their own money when the stakes are low.
Money is the medium of exchange in the real world. Give your children opportunities to develop fluency with it. Let them earn it, save it, and appreciate what it can — and can’t — do for them.
Talking to Strangers
This can be scary for parents. Out of an abundance of caution, we explicitly tell our kids not to talk to strangers, or we steer them away from opportunities to engage with strangers.
We have sort of demonized new people as strangers. That framing naturally creates distance and fear.
The lack of desire to talk to strangers can be worse than the inability to do so. Compounded over time, it can paralyze adolescents entering adulthood at precisely the phase of their life when they need to rely on people who are not familiar to them.
Get over your fear in appropriate doses. Let them talk to strangers. Encourage it even.
It is a skill that will give them an enormous advantage in adulthood.
Planning
Great parents provide their kids with enriching experiences and should be lauded for it. Those experiences often require lots of planning.
In our quest to be the best parents we can, we make the plans perfect, hoping the destination will leave its mark on our kids. But the messiness of the plan is sometimes what makes the destination so rewarding. Let your kids participate in the entirety of the experience. It will deepen its meaning for them, and help them learn some very practical skills.
Some easy elements of planning that you can immediately include your kids in are devising timelines, crafting rudimentary budgets, and helping decide where to eat. You can create countless permutations to these simple elements by raising the level of complexity or dividing your activity into smaller pieces.
Let your kids loose on planning and you might even benefit from some creative thinking from your kids.
Exploration
Young children learn most when they are at play. As they grow older, we formalize learning and tamp out the opportunities to play. But that instinct does not disappear.
The cognitive benefits of exploration are well documented. Kids who explore are more creative and confident. They develop a sense of independence and optimism.
Optimism, in particular, is an indicator and a cause of good mental health. The optimistic child learns that they will face challenges in their life but nothing that they can’t overcome. To them, there is always a solution or a path to success.
They will develop optimism only when they face difficulties on their own and overcome them. Letting them explore — in the real world where real people and real challenges await — gives them opportunities to fashion their own learning.
It can be difficult to let your child take public transit alone for the first time, or shop at the store by themselves. But the benefits can also be immeasurably positive.
Common to all of these are:
- They are skills that can be learned.
- They can be taught through effective modeling.
- They involve relatively little effort on your part.
- Mastery of them will have enormous benefits for your children when they are adults.
This is not advice to turn your little ones into mini Gordon Geckos. But surely you want your child to be creative, resourceful, and powerful in their way when they take on the world.
These five skills will raise their chances of them conquering it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash