8 critical life lessons to teach your child

Be kind. 

What’s on the inside counts the most, sweet child.  Beauty comes from within.  The way you look on the outside is only superficial.  Most of all, the absolute most critical life lessons include being kind. Be generous, helpful and patient.  The best way to teach this first of eight critical life lessons to teach your child is to model kindness.  While I have made mistakes in doing this myself, I bring attention to what I did wrong by talking about it.

When you model kindness, it will then become natural to your child.  

During a recent wind storm in our area, tens of thousands lost power.  We have a whole home generator so my daughter wanted to send this message to friends and strangers right away:

In our home, we employ a “question of the day” around the dinner table. Asking questions has proven to be a fun way to ignite conversations and get to each other’s heart.

A good idea would be for us to add a standard question to our table talk every evening regarding kindness. These questions would work well:

• Who were you kind to today?
• What did you do that was kind today?
• Who was helpful to you today and how what did they do?
• What could you do to show kindness to someone tomorrow? It doesn’t have to be a friend; it could be a teacher, your school bus driver or what about our mailman?

Challenges usually have positive impacts in the end.

Life can be unfair, but while you can’t pick what happens to you sometimes, you CAN decide how you respond. Your response will determine how you feel.

Bruce Lee said, “Don’t pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”

Life is full of challenges and overcoming challenges creates a feeling of happiness. Digging deeper, I can prove this to be true:

First example: Jane wants to lose weight (first challenge) but is unsure when she will have time to workout (second challenge). Jane overcomes these obstacles by committing to getting up an hour early every morning to go for a long walk. Six months later, Jane has reached her goal of losing ten pounds plus an extra two. Jane is happy as a result of overcoming her challenges.

Second example:

This the shortest version of a cluster of challenges I faced several years ago. I went into labor two months before my due date.

My daughter was in the NICU, and I was sick with an unknown illness. At one point, we were both admitted at separate hospitals.

Soon after we were both released, I closed my business to be able to focus 100% on my newborn and myself.

In the end, I was stronger as a mom and wife because I was able to get the help I needed for the postpartum depression I developed. While I could not understand while we were going through that season of life, I’m undeniably stronger and a more compassionate person as a result.

Mistakes are good.

My five-year-old is a competitive dancer, and she takes it seriously. This weekend was her first competition of a new season. New season = new dances.

Her final dance of the evening was a big one. It’s called a production, and there are a lot of moving pieces. When the music started, she knew when to come out from behind the curtain. She’d never done this kind of dance at a competition before. She got out on stage and was immediately confused. She couldn’t remember where to go. All eyes were on her, and everyone knew she was messing up.

Kaylee quickly recovered, got to her position and danced her part near flawlessly the rest of her time on stage.

At the end of the performance, I arrived backstage to a disappointed little girl crying her eyes out because “I messed up. We are not going to win, and it’s all my fault.”

At that moment, all I could do was hug her. My heart was ripping into pieces. You see, Kaylee is a kind little girl. If you ask her who the best dancer in her class is, she will look down on you for asking such a question. “Everyone in my class is a good dancer” is her response.

Kaylee felt like she failed her team last night and I was at a loss for how to respond at the opportunity to teach her this life lesson in front of me: we all make mistakes in life. We learn from them. When we fall, we get back up and keep going. “And that’s what you did, Kaylee.”

She wasn’t receptive, but I guess this is a longer-term conversation. I will bring this up tomorrow; about mistakes and what we do about them in life. Mistakes are going to happen, and they’re beneficial because what we learn from them makes us stronger; they make us who we are. Mistakes don’t define us. Mistakes teach us how to be better.

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The importance of honesty.

Lying hurts people.  Teaching the importance of honestly early and often is so important.

Read or tell the story of the boy who cried wolf.  Give examples.  Tell stories.  Then, dig deeper and teach about integrity: doing the right thing when no one is looking.

Surround yourself with positive people.

Negative, mean and toxic ones will drain your own happiness.

A smart friend once said to me, “Surround yourself with people you would want your daughter to grown up and be like.”  

That’s some solid, sound, smart advice.

People will let you down.

Don’t dwell or try to analyze why they let you down.  We don’t know what they’re going through behind closed doors.  Perhaps they’re battling struggles we know nothing about.  Give them grace and move on.

Make healthy choices.

If there’s one thing I could change as a new mom, it would be to go back and change the food options I started presenting at a young age.  We only get one body and fueling it with healthy food provides nothing but positive results in the end.

I’ll go ahead and offer myself grace here though and recognize that as a mom, I have the choice to make changes now.  It’s not too late to only have healthy options in my home to encourage healthy eating and limit processed food.

Always do your best.

And the last of the eight critical life lessons is to always do your best.  Learn from your mistakes (refer to #3) and give yourself grace, always.