The Art of Role Modeling

Over the years we’ve crammed a lifetime of intentional training into our children, which we’re eager to shrae in this blog.  But despite our best efforts, the most valuable life skills our kids learned from us haven’t been a result of our brilliantly planned, scheduled, and structured teaching. Instead, they’ve absorbed both good and bad skills by osmosis. Whether it’s the noble and courageous act of reaching out to someone who’s suffering, or leaving the empty milk containers in the refrigerator, they learned it without our direct instruction.  As they interact with us, watching and learning from our examples, they begin to emulate us.  In times of crisis or uncertainty, they’ll draw on those household experiences and examples they’ve had growing up, and then use them to make critical and life changing decisions.  For better or worse, we’re their role models. 

Because our actions have so much influence in our kid’s lives, our lifestyles are critical to raising successful children. When we want our children to be kind, moral, generous, responsible, healthy, and purposeful, we need to first display those characteristics in our own lives.  No amount of lecturing on healthy eating and exercise is going to sink into them if we mumble it from the couch through handfuls of potato chips.  Every time the two of us talk about the changes we want to see in our children’s behavior, we have to re-evaluate our own lives.  Are we parents living the lifestyle we want to pass on to our children?  While our kids were preschoolers, we would casually throw around the phrase, “I hate it when that happens.” Eventually, our children began to tell us that they hated objects, activities, and even people, which is pretty strong language for preschoolers.  When we asked them if their feelings were really that strong, they told us that they didn’t truly hate anything or anyone, but were just using words that they’d heard us using.  We decided that “hate” would be a “bad word” in our house for a while, and shortly after we stopped using it, the kids did too.

Are we kind and generous in our interactions with ourselves and other people, or are we self-serving?  Are we exercising and eating right, or are we stuffing ourselves with junk food in front of the television?  Do we establish goals and pursue them with discipline, or do we wander through life without purpose?  Is our language wholesome, and our communication free from deception? Do we take responsibility for our actions?  Do we love each other unconditionally and selflessly? Do we put in the work to stay married for the rest of our lives? Do we fight without shouting, calling each other names, or using other hurtful tactics?  Do we honor our agreements? Do we have our addictions and anger under control? 

These are the aspects of successful childrearing that we can’t teach to our children through lectures.  We have to live the way we want our kids to live, and not just when we think they can see and hear us. If we want our children to have admirable character, we have to become adults of good character.  Kids are too smart, and will see through our ingenuous attempts to fake good character. Some friends of ours had a toddler who was tightly bonded to his purple dinosaur plush toy, which they misplaced right before an airplane trip.  In exasperation, the mother exclaimed, “Where is that little purple s**t?”  Do you know what that toddler called his plush toy for months afterward, including every time he saw the character on television?  You guessed it, everywhere he went, he called it “Purple s**t.”

Rick has been through several breakfast “phases” since the kids have been old enough to prepare their own breakfasts.  For a while, he was eating peanut butter on toast for breakfast, and we suddenly noticed we weren’t going through any cold cereal, but were using a lot of peanut butter and bread. Then Rick began microwaving an egg in a bowl for breakfast, and suddenly all the kids were microwaving eggs for breakfast.  The same thing happened when he started eating yogurt for breakfast, and again when he returned to cold cereal.  For a while, we had extra leftovers, so Rick started re-heating leftovers for breakfast, until the kids started cleaning them out for their own breakfasts.  Lately, we’d returned to cold cereal and milk again, but Rick started pouring yogurt over his cereal instead of milk.  The other day, we discovered that a gallon of milk had gone bad, but we were out of yogurt again.  It seems that the older two kids were pouring yogurt on their breakfast cereal. 

Once the kids were old enough to serve themselves breakfast, we began stocking cold breakfast cereal in the pantry, and gallons of milk in the refrigerator, under the assumption that they would eat cereal and milk for breakfast.  We never told them to eat toast, or eggs, or yogurt, or leftovers. They just picked it up from Rick on their own.  If they are imitating us in such trivial things as breakfast foods, what truly good and bad habits are they catching from us?  We parents need to have good character, so our children can catch it from us.  We need to be the kind of people we want our children to become.  We need to take a deep look at our own motivations, thoughts, and actions, and Rick needs to start eating vegetables for breakfast.

The Lost Art of Friendship

For kids to bond, they need time together doing an engaging activity.  For toddlers and pre-school children, we arranged  times for friends to meet with our children, either by joining “play groups” where parents and their children meet weekly at parks or other child-friendly locations, or by inviting children over to our house for “play dates.” As our children entered school, there were many more opportunities to meet with friends in addition to play dates, including parties, organized sports, and clubs.  The key was to make sure that our children were spending time with their friends in engaging and positive activities. 

After we’d planned a meeting for our kid’s friends, we’d start planning engaging activities for them.  Engaging activities are activities that interest and engage the children, while allowing them an opportunity to interact with each other.  To set up the best environment to attract friends, we wanted to create play times with our child unique from their friend’s other play experiences.  While we didn’t need to have all of the latest and greatest toys and resources, we did try to purchase one or two unique and age appropriate activities that kids might not have at their own home. For instance, we were the house that had swings and a slide, or the toy with all the fascinating parts and little people, or the house with the finger paints and other art supplies.  When we didn’t have the resources to purchase unique toys, we provided novelty by hosting creative activities.   We took the kids to the park to teach them outdoor games, hosted dress-up parties (nail polish is a big draw) and allowed the entire family room to be turned into a giant blanket fort.  For a while, we were the only household that allowed rubber band gun fights, and we couldn’t keep the boys away.  They key is to provide an engaging activity that will consistently draw your kid’s friends to them.

Not all engaging activities are pure “fun” or “play.”   Our kids formed stronger bonds over activities with a purpose than they did with entertainment activities.  Some of our kid’s strongest bonds of friendship have been formed while helping us with chores and projects around our house, or with community service like landscaping our high school, building houses for the homeless, or serving at our local church.  It’s not unusual for our children to tell their friends that they have to spend 2 hours on a Saturday landscaping before they can play, and have the friend offer to come over early to dig in the yard or haul wheelbarrows.  Other parents are amazed that their children are eager to join us in “work,” but we find that children get deep gratification from activities that have a purpose, or that teach them a new skill.  When we take a group of teenagers to Mexico each year to build houses for the homeless, we work them all day like adults, but then they tell us things like, “this is the hardest I’ve ever worked, and the most tired I’ve ever been, but it’s also the most fun I’ve ever had.  I’d rather do this than take a vacation at an amusement park.”  In that week, those teenagers form permanent and inexplicable bonds with our children that go much deeper than the normal disruptive forces of teenage life.

For friendships to grow, friends need to know they are physically and emotionally safe, and that they are valued and cherished.  Physical safety means that toddlers and pre-school children don’t bite, grade school children don’t hit, and teenagers, especially girls, never feel physically threatened in our home. Children feel emotionally safe in our house because toddlers don’t scream, school children don’t call each other names, middle school children aren’t cruel to each other, and teenagers aren’t duplicitous.  Since we value physical and emotional safety for both our children and their friends, we intentionally trained each of these negative behaviors out of our children, through modeling, instruction, and discipline.  We’ve even caught them being champions of physical and emotional safety (“You shouldn’t call her that mean name.”).

Because we value people, we trained our children to value and cherish their friends and acquaintances.  We’ve all met the socially inept child that struggles to make friends, but what was it about that child that kept them from forming friendships?  It’s often that they don’t value other children with their time, respect, conversations, and resources.  We’ve noticed that children who love others are generous: they listen to their friends instead of dominating the conversation and always talking about themselves.  They share their toys and games, and concede their opinions and desires to their friends; they don’t insist on doing their favorite activity every time they play.  This is not to say that generous children are pushovers or doormats, because our children have very strong opinions and personal presence; but we’ve trained them to consider their friend’s preferences and desires when choosing their activities.  When we’d invited an artistic child over to play, our kids didn’t expect an athletic experience, so they’d offer up a couple of their favorite artistic activities, like drawing or making crafts.  With their more athletic friends, they’d suggest riding scooters or playing ball.

Friendly children often have strong personalities, which attract other children, but they are also polite and kind to the children who gather around them.  As we train our children to be loving and kind, which is a difficult and ongoing endeavor, we can’t just instruct them at home alone in a vacuum.  When they play with friends, we monitor their activities, correcting and directing them to be safe, kind, and generous.  Especially when they were very young, it was tempting to drop them into a group of children and run to another room so we could take a break with other parents. Instead, we found that if we wanted to train our children to be good friends, we had to be actively involved with them while they played.  If they were being selfish with toys, or reacting to conflict physically, or being mean and rude, we had to be there to correct them or even discipline them, taking an active role in their social development.  

The Art of Natural Consequences

When adults are foolish, they receive the natural consequences of their actions.  For instance, when they act dangerously, they are physically injured.  When they are rude, mean, or hurtful to others, they lose relationships.  When adults act stupidly, they suffer financially.  Because life has these natural consequences, we do our best to make the “punishment fit the crime,” making the discipline as close to the natural consequence of breaking the rule as possible. When a child wouldn’t share their toys, we took away a favorite toy.  When they threw a fit (which is a demand for attention), we gave them a time-out away from other people.  When older children broke something through disobedience, (“don’t slam that glass door, or it will break!”), we had them participate in the repair work, either financially or as a helper.

When our teenage daughter violated our “only use nail polish remover on the bathroom counter” policy, she learned how to refinish Becky’s brand new kitchen table the hard way (did you know that nail polish remover dissolves Styrofoam cups in a really cool way, but doesn’t stop when it hits varnish?).  We weren’t always able to make a good fit, but were always searching for creative discipline to match the infractions.  Surprisingly, when we asked the kids for their suggestions, they often came up with very creative disciplines, especially when it was for their siblings!

Each child is different, valuing different objects or freedoms.  For our introverted pre-teen, we found that just the threat of removing his bedroom door was enough to correct a serious behavior problem.  For our extroverted teenager, one day’s restriction from the cell phone was much harder than a week’s restriction from any other activities or objects.  Some children’s personalities will only require a stern look and the threat of discipline, while others will require draconian measures before they will change a bad behavior.  Make sure to study your child to see how they’re built, so you’re administering a discipline that is personalized and appropriately restricting to cause a change in behavior.

At first, we were concerned that removing a favorite toy or object would bond the kids tighter to that object, and make it a problem in the future.  However, our experience was just the opposite.  When they received the security blanket or plush toy back at the end of the discipline, they bonded to it for a short time, but then abandoned it in the long term.  They learned that no object is truly secure, and began to find their security in other, more appropriate places.  In our materialistic society, we’re surprised to find that none of our teenagers are tightly bonded to any of their possessions.  They may value what an object represents, like the communication from a cell phone, the enjoyment of a video game console, or the freedom of a vehicle, but they don’t mourn the loss of any of these objects if they are broken.

The Art of Group Dating

The first part of our plan was to encourage our children to have positive interactions with the opposite gender, as early possible.  In pre-school, they were happy to engage in play activities without regard to gender.  By grade school, they seemed to have a natural draw to spend time within their own gender, but we still encouraged them to form cross-gender groups and partnerships for school projects, and to interact with family friends of the opposite gender in social situations.

Once our kids hit the pre-teen years of middle school, we began encouraging them to participate socially in what our friends called “group dates.”  We wanted them to learn how to interact with other kids of the opposite gender, and begin to assess which personality traits they valued in people of the opposite gender, without the intimacy of one-on-one dating situations.  Group dating allowed our kids to have the kind of social interaction that allows exploration in an emotionally safe environment.  It gave them opportunities to become familiar with a new boy or girl by interacting with their group of friends, outside of the pressure and awkwardness of a formal date.  Here are some guidelines to help your kids with successful group dating:

All events should be adult supervised.  For pre-teens, this means parental supervision.  For teens, it can also include other adults at supervised events like school socials and dances, church youth gatherings, and birthday parties.  Your supervision shouldn’t be suffocating, but you’ll want to keep an eye on what’s going on.

Parental planning and facilitation. In the pre-teen and young teen years, parents should be involved in the planning, to help orchestrate a successful social event. You may also need to host in your home or drive all the kids to an event.

It’s best to start with large groups.  Even if the boys and girls stay grouped by gender for most of the social activity, they will at least begin to get comfortable having each other around.  As your kids get more comfortable breaking the ice and interacting, you can reduce the size of the groups.

Odd numbers are best.  You want to avoid pairing off, so an odd number of kids are best, but not required.  For special events, like formal school dances, this may not be possible, but the goal is to avoid the pain of adolescent infatuation.  Double-dating is OK for teens, as long as the goal isn’t to begin a “steady” relationship.

Have them bring a friend.  When inviting friends of the opposite gender to a social event, the most common question is, “who else is going to be there?”  No awkward pre-teen wants to be the only boy or girl at an event.  We recommend all invitations to mixed social events always either extend an invitation to bring a same-gender friend, or clarification that a close friend is also being invited.  Don’t be surprised if everyone needs a separate phone or text message conversation with all of their friends to make a group decision before accepting the invitation.

The Art of Building Self-Esteem

Parents build self-esteem in their children by affirming who they are and what they’ve achieved.   Hollow praise does not build self-esteem, and neither does an unrecognized achievement. If we woke up every morning and told each of our kids, “Wow, you are the most amazing child!  You are just wonderful!” they would turn into conceited praise junkies, but wouldn’t truly have strong self-esteem, because we wouldn’t be giving them specific affirmation, just vague feel-good flattery.  On the other side, if we were critical of every achievement, always pointing out how they could have done better, or where they should have improved, they would never have a positive self-image or confidence in their abilities.  In order to build self-esteem, you have to affirm an actual achievement, no matter how small it was.

The first time our kids made the bed by themselves, they looked terrible; lumpy, with the sheets showing and the covers all skewed.  We told them, “You made the bed all by yourself.  I’m proud of you for making your bed.”  Instead of criticizing their work, or re-doing it to our adult standards, we affirmed them for making the bed themselves.  Then the next day when it was time to make their bed, they weren’t thinking, “I’m not sure if I can make the bed good enough,” they were thinking, “I made my bed by myself yesterday.  I think I can do it again today.”  They had high self-confidence about making beds.  Their self-esteem had grown, and in a few days they would be ready for more bed-making instruction, along with a new affirmation for their increased skill level.

We complimented our children on small achievements, and celebrated with them on large achievements.  We kept our eyes open for each new athletic skill, song learned, school project completed, or social skill practiced, and then complimented them on their successes.  And when they failed, as they often did, we affirmed them for trying, because it takes courage to try new things.  Our daughter has always been tall for her age, finally growing to just under six feet tall as a pre-teen.  So when she expressed interest in gymnastics, we signed her up, and took her to practices, where she towered head-and-shoulders above the other girls her age.  She worked hard at it for months, but her constantly growing arms and legs kept her from having the coordination and strength to be successful.  Even though she failed to become a gymnast, we still see her attempt at gymnastics as a positive experience.  Since we affirmed her adventurous spirit, she went on to try many other athletic options, with varying success, and she now has the self-confidence to try new sports that appeal to her, without fear of failure.

We also built our children’s self-images by affirming them when they made good choices, especially choices that lead to emotional or moral victories.  When our children demonstrated good character qualities, we were quick to affirm them.  If they were kind, or generous, or patient, we would compliment them on their achievement.  After they shared a toy with a visitor, we’d tell them, “That was kind of you to share.  You are a generous boy to share your toys with others.”  By affirming character qualities, we gave our children a self-esteem that went outside of skills or performance.  We gave them a sense of self-worth that was based on who they were, not just what they could do.  While affirming a child’s skills builds confidence, it can also lead to a feeling of conditional love, where the child only feels loved by the parent if they continue to gain new skills.  By affirming their growth of character, our children gained a sense of being loved unconditionally, because they were affirmed for who they’d become, not just what they’d accomplished.  For this reason, we try to affirm the character demonstrated as well as the skill when a new goal is achieved, saying, “I’m proud to see the hard work and sacrifice you’ve put in to become a better piano player, because you played with very few mistakes at your recital.”

So, how does a parent intentionally build self-esteem in their child?  By setting small, achievable goals, and affirming or celebrating the achievement of those goals.  These goals should be for their physical, musical, mental, emotional, and character development, and should be shared with the child, so they know they are working toward something, and can enjoy the feeling of accomplishment.  For example, you teach and affirm sports to small children by setting goals to kick a ball, then throw it, then catch it, then catch it a number of times in a row, then use it to score.  Each of these activities should be a separate goal, with a mini-celebration when the child achieves them. 

During puberty, most kids will experience a crisis in self-esteem, and will need a different kind of support from what they needed in grade school.  For the first time in their lives, they will hit brick walls, and they will also start experimenting with new personalities and identities.  As competition increases, they learn the cold hard truth that no matter how hard they try, they’ll never have the raw talent to be the professional athlete, musician, or scholar they dreamed of being in grade school.  They compare themselves to others around them, including successful siblings, and get the feeling that, “I’m not good at anything.” When they realize that they either can’t be who they wanted to be, or don’t want to be who they are now, they start experimenting with new personality traits and identities.  In all this hormonal confusion and uncertainty, they’re trying to build their self-esteem in new areas, and have a deep need for affirmation.  They need to know that their parents love them and accept them, even if they dress funny and act differently.  If their parents are critical of these experimental changes, but their friends affirm their experimentation, they will continue to drift toward their friend’s influence, and become more open to experimentation with sex, drugs, stealing, or vandalism.  Because of these radical changes, some parents of pre-teens become overwhelmed and abandon their previous efforts to build self-esteem in their children.  However, at this age, they need very intentional development of their self-worth from their parents to survive their self-identity crisis successfully.