Life Skills For Kids

Raising children has never been easy, but parents today face fresh challenges. And the stakes could not be higher, as reflected in the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts among both children and teens over the past 20 years. The collision between technology, rapidly changing cultural norms, and child-rearing has created a complex array of problems that parents must navigate.

Added to these pressures are the unrealistically high expectations attached to parenting. Mothers and fathers are expected to be closely involved in nearly all aspects of their child’s life. This includes attending every athletic event, making homemade/organically grown meals, keeping children occupied with state-of-the-art toys that are both educational and engaging, monitoring their child’s every emotional shift, and encouraging academic excellence from the earliest grades, but teaching them that their self-esteem is independent of achievement.

All of these concerns must be pursued cheerfully while being ever mindful to keep a healthy work/home life balance, maintain a strong marriage, continue to advance at work, and, just for good measure, get to the gym several times a week. Within this dizzying kaleidoscope of pressures, it is easy to lose sight of parenting’s main goal: to prepare children to succeed in adulthood. Although what it means to succeed as an adult has many nuances, most would agree that, at its core, this includes becoming a productive, independent, and emotionally stable individual capable of forming mature, rewarding relationships.

For children to grow into this type of adult, they must first build the skills that are required for the task. If, for example, you wish to own a successful business, you must first acquire a variety of business-related skills. Childhood is the training ground where "adulting" skills are first forged and sharpened. This occurs as young boys and girls grapple with the myriad setbacks, insecurities, frustrations, and more that confront every child. Parents who wisely guide their children in solving these problems (eventually on their own) are simply preparing their sons and daughters for adulthood.

On the other hand, parents who shield their youngsters from these hardships deprive them of the experiences necessary to build the capacity to deal with the more difficult challenges they will face later in life. Although there are many elements of child-rearing involved in effective parenting, let’s examine three essentials: instilling the capacity for hard work, delaying gratification, and building self-discipline.

For young children, work normally consists of household chores. Older children may babysit, mow lawns in their neighborhood, or volunteer with a church or civic organization. When they are in their teens, job opportunities in a formal work setting become available. Each of these forms of work plays a crucial role in building a youngster’s sense of competency, self-esteem, work ethic, and even their ability to get along with others. The powerful effects of work derive from requiring a child to focus on a task, persevere while completing it, judge whether it was done correctly, and most often have others make the same judgment.

Success brings a sense of pride and accomplishment, while failure teaches the child how to make corrections and the importance of persistence when success is not immediate. When chores are assigned to be completed by two or more children, it has the added benefit of teaching them how to work as a team and promotes essential skills of accepting the interpersonal give and take required to reach a goal. Patience, the ability to delay gratification, is a virtue acquired through repeated denial. Acquiring this capacity— that is, to deny acting on strong urges—is essential for success as an adult. A Chinese proverb states, “One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.”

To delay gratification is to go against your basic instincts. It is a quality that one is not born with, but must be learned. Research shows that the ability to delay gratification at a very young age ultimately leads to higher academic success and fewer emotional problems in the future. Having the capacity to wait for a reward is essential if one is to develop the ability to persist toward a goal despite setbacks and the inevitable frustrations that arise when pursuing a significant achievement. This is true in business, academics, hobbies, and relationships.

Impatience and the need to have one’s desires fulfilled immediately lead to bad choices. Having the capacity to "play the long game" and persist in the face of adversity is essential for many of the goals each of us strives for in life. Whereas exercising patience is most often a passive act, self-discipline can be active or passive. At times, it requires one to do that which would preferably be avoided. At other times, it involves not doing the thing you desperately desire to do.

-Psychology Today