Teaching Our Kids To Deal With Life

As parents it’s not only our responsibility but it’s our duty to prepare our kids for life. Life happens and it happens in many different ways. Sure, you will have some very good times in your life but you will also go through some very tough times emotionally, physically, financially, mentally and spiritually. We as parents need to make sure that we teach our kids how to cope with these tough times in a positive way and give them the tools they need in order to make it through the stages in their lives. Poor coping skills and lack of awareness about emotions and how they affect you will make children unable to deal with things like death, parents divorcing, best friend moving away and later in their life things like loss of a job, relationship breakup, problems at work and the list could go on and on. This usually leads to negative behavior such as drug or alcohol use, cutting, acting out or harming others. We make take the proper steps when our children are young and teach them how to deal with life’s problems. Let take a look at some of the key things that you need to teach your children.

Responsibility

This is a big one and usually a little difficult to teach children because as parents we tend to want to baby our kids until they are grown and move out. We may think at the time that we are doing them a favor by taking care of their every need but in reality all we are doing is teaching them lack of responsibility. For example, if you never teach your child you’re to clean up after themselves, to clean their room, wash their clothes and help around the house then you are raising a child that will not know how to keep their own home clean in their adult life. They will struggle to be organized and clean and it will affect them at work and in their personal relationships. To prevent this from happening to your child it’s pretty easy if you start teaching them as toddlers to pick up their toys when they are done playing. Then as they get older make them keep their room clean and actually check on the cleanliness to show them where they need improvement. When they get to be close to the teenage years you can give them chores to do around the house and pay them for their work. This helps them start to learn that you must work in life to earn money to pay for the things you want. You know as well as I do that it’s hard to get up and go to work every day especially when you are tired or sick. Showing them that they have to work in order to make money will help them be responsible in the career with going to work every day and being on time.

Emotions

Our emotions come in all forms but the most recognizable and common emotions are happy and sad. Now, if you dig into each one of these emotions you will find hundreds of other words that describe a more detailed form of both of these emotions. Life is easy when things are going good and you don’t have problems but when things take a turn for the worse your children must know how to deal with it in a positive way and keep going. For example, dealing with the loss of a pet is something that is actually good for a child to go through because it teaches them about loss and death which are all a part of life. Learning how to cope with this as a child will help them cope with it as an adult. Your kids need to know that it’s okay to be sad and to cry as long as they don’t stay there. Let me deconstruct this for you. Being sad is a normal emotion to experience in the event of a loss. Crying is a normal reaction to sadness and its okay to do and feel both of these things. However, they need to understand that they can’t stay in this emotional state for too long. They must process the feeling and gradually as the days go on progress into getting better.