7 Things We Should Let Our Kids Know To Make Them a Better Person In Future
Our experiences are the guiding memories for our children
Our children are not only our future they are the future world.
We always work hard round the clock to earn more money for our children but we fail to teach them the experience that we gained in our life.
Everyone thinks once we send our kids to school then he or she will be knowledgeable but the truth is that only school education will not help our kids to succeed in their life.
They need to know something more beyond formal education.
As a parent, we are not only responsible to teach our kids what is right and wrong but also let them know our life experiences that slowly make them a better person in the world.
There are some life experiences that every parent can let their kids know to make them live a better life in the future.
1. Buy only if it is affordable
You buy things that your kids ask for even if you can’t afford it.
I can understand that you want your children to be happy always, but this is not the right way to make them happy.
Your kids will be caught up in a mindset that their happiness lies in the thing they have asked for. So as they grow they tend to buy things even if they can’t afford them and falls into the trap of debt.
We have to let our children slowly perceive the truth that real happiness exists only in a debt-free life.
If you can’t pay cash for an item, then you can’t afford it. Don’t let monthly payments become a way of life for your family.
— Unknown
What to do?
If your children ask for a plaything that you can’t afford, tell them the truth that you don’t have enough money to buy that. This will create a mindset in your children that anything should be bought only if they have enough money in their pocket.
2. Can earn money only by toil
Everyone forgets the truth that every single penny that we earn does not come to us easily.
We really work hard to earn every single penny but the mistake that we do is we will not let our kids know about this.
We give our kids pocket money only for the sake of their happiness. This seeds a thought in the mind that they can get money by doing nothing.
Hence as they grow they will not know the value of money.
This attitude towards money eventually makes them lazy and always dependent on their parents for money.
Never spend your money before you have earned it
— Thomas Jefferson
What to do?
Don’t give them pocket money instead ask them to do some household works and based on the work they did give them the stipend.
If we do this, our children will understand that money comes only if they do work and more hard work will give them more money.
Moreover, they will also know how hard their parents are working to earn money.
3. Saving penny is important than spending
Saving is the most important one in our life.
The simple fact of saving is that it will save us from spending our money unnecessarily, will save us from financial crises in the future, will save us and our family from debts.
Even though we know why saving money is important, most of us will not save money because we are not habituated to do that.
Most of our parents didn’t teach us how much it is important to save money in our childhood. Only when savings become our habit we can save money regardless of whatever stipend we get.
We should not do the same mistake to our children that our parents did to us because of unawareness.
Our children should know the value of saving money that they earn. They should know saving is important than spending.
Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.
— Warren Buffet
What to do?
- Buy your children four to five money boxes and ask them to label each box with its future purpose. Let’s say if they want to buy a bicycle ask them to label a money box To buy a bicycle. By doing this they learn to tie their savings with a purpose.
- Ask them to save the money that they have earned through household works even if it is very low. This creates a habit of saving money even if they get a low stipend in the future.
- Ask them to wait until the money gets matured so that it can be used for the labeled purpose. This creates the habit of purposeful waiting, putting aside instant gratification to achieve something lasting and worthwhile.
4. Failures are good
Many parents don’t want their kids to fail in any situation and want them to succeed in all places.
So if they fail at something you punish them. This creates a mindset in your children that failures are really bad and if they failed they will be punished.
This thought makes them fragile and it will easily break them down when they meet failures.
As a result, they will be always surrounded by the fear of failure. So they hesitate to make the decision, hide their mistakes, fail to be bold, and always worry about the future.
This creates stress in their minds and this is the reason why many young people today are not able to handle their failures.
We have to make our kids understand that success and failures are part of our life and failures are really good that creates an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
Failure is the only opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently
— Henry Ford
What to do?
- When your kids fail at something, sit with them, have a casual talk with them like a friend, and help them in finding the cause of the failure. This creates a mindset that they have someone to share their failures.
- Help them to write down their mistake in a notebook. By doing this they will remember the mistakes they have did earlier and will avoid doing the same mistake in the future.
- Assist them to analyze what they have learned from their mistake and note it down by the side of each mistake in the notebook.
- And finally, label the notebook as Success. In this way, we can seed them thought that a bunch of mistakes and learnings from those mistakes will lead them to success.
5. Purposeful prayers
I would say prayer is the way to consciously feeding thoughts to our minds and connect with our inner selves.
Our mind is like soil that will grow all kinds of seeds, good or bad. So it is in our hands to always grow good thoughts in our minds.
Everything that happens in our life is because of the thought that we feed into our minds.
In the book The Power of Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy has mentioned that “Every thought is a cause, and every condition is an effect”.
So feeding good positive thoughts will create good actions which in turn generates a good life.
Most of us know this but we just don’t live it because we failed to create it as a habit.
But as a parent, we should not fail to teach our kids about the value of prayer.
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays
— Soren Kierkegaard
What to do?
1. In the morning ask your kids to pray for the things they need in life like good health, goodwill, prosperity, courage, clarity, and peace. In this way, they can purposefully seed thought of how they want to see themself in the future.
Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
2. Help your kids to create a habit of praying for others. This feeds the thought of compassion, empathy, caring, and sympathy in your children’s minds.
- Praying for a stranger who is in an ambulance, when the ambulance crosses.
- Praying for the families who lost their loving ones.
- Praying for the people who stay in the street.
3. Encourage your kids to pray before the meal to say thanks to farmers and workers. This creates awareness to your children that someone is working really hard to make the food available on their plates so they should not waste the food.
4. Finally, in the prayer before sleep ask your kids to say aloud how grateful they were today. This is a kind of self-reflection and stress releaser before going to sleep. Let your children have a peaceful sleep.
6. Self-encouragement
Many people look for encouragement from outside. If they didn’t get one from outside then they feel discouraged.
When we feel discouraged, we lose interest in working on our goals and wait for external motivations to start working again. This makes us always dependent on others for motivation.
During my initial days as a writer, I wrote new articles only when I was motivated, only when I got claps and positive comments for my previous write-ups.
Because of this, I showed up only less progress in writting.
Then I slowly started to generate motivation from the improvement that I made by acquiring knowledge through books, articles, and podcasts.
If self-encouragement is practiced from childhood then it makes your children see more inside them than outside.
When it becomes a habit then your kids start to generate motivation from every small thing they do in their life that results in a positive attitude. A positive attitude leads to a positive life.
When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.
— Joel Osteen
What to do?
Whenever my two years old princess tries to build the building blocks, we used to say her to clap for the effort she made. This slowly created a habit of clapping for every effort she makes, within her.
So ask your kids to clap for every small effort that they make.
By doing this they will not only develop the habit of self-encouragement but also they will understand the truth that efforts are more important than success.
7. Reading books
Books are the source of wider and deeper knowledge. A person who has the habit of reading books can be a person of incredible spontaneity and creativity.
Reading books gives us ideas from different perspectives.
You can’t experience everything but you can learn about other's life experiences through books.
Oprah once said “Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door”
I realized the value of reading books only in my mid-twenties because no one taught me that books are so valuable and have the power to change our life.
But I will not make my daughter feel the same after thirty years. When book reading becomes a habit from childhood it will make a drastic change in the way our children think.
Our children can able to think outside their boundaries, their imagination and memory power increases that results in good grades.
Moreover, as they grow they can easily connect ideas, confidently choose the field of interest, and can also succeed in the chosen field.
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
- Albert Einstein
What to do?
- If your kids are too young to read books then you read them fairy tales. Create a habit of reading them fairy tales daily before going to bed. This simply broadens their imagination.
- As a parent, we are the first role model for our children. They grow by seeing us and try to emulate us. So we have to inspire them by reading books in front of them.
- Instead of spending your money on unwanted things, invest your money in building a mini library in your home. A mini-library can be one or two shelves with books arranged. This setup attracts your kids to read more books.
Final Thoughts
Our children are the future world, they are going to live after us. So as a parent, we have to let them know the experiences that we gained.
These shared experiences will be worthful memories for your children, that will guide them when they live life without us.