Happy 4th of July & 241st independence day celebration to the United States of America!!
I would like to thank everyone for your positive feedback on my last post. Its super encouraging to know that people are out there reading & that the posts actually make sense & they are helpful.
In the last post, we looked at cultivating leadership skills in our kids by MODELLING!
Our actions ( especially) in front of our kids are much louder than our words. As human beings, we think in pictures, if I say the word CAT, you dont think about the letters C,A & T, you actually picture a cat (white or black or a combination of both colours, fat or thin, etc) in your mind.
Its very essential that we model the right traits & characters in front of our kids at all time.
As a father, I know that the way I treat my wife in front of my son begins to shape how he will treat his female friends & ultimately his wife. The same for my daughter, she begins to see how a man treats his wife & starts to form expectations in that regards. My wife also models the same thing for them.
It’s amazing that most times (not in all cases), men tend to marry a woman like their mother & ladies marry men that are like their dads. That is how much impact modelling can have on our kids.
The next point is MANAGEMENT & we are going to spend some time on this one.
Good management is the ability to discern the uniqueness of a child and teach him or her accordingly. We are to train up our kids in the way they should go & that will involve adapting our training style to their uniqueness.
As a project management professional, I know that projects are unique. No 2 projects are alike, even if you are repeating a similar project that you’ve done before, something will be different, either the expected quality, budget or timelines would have changed.
Your resources to deliver the project could change also & each project comes with its unique set of challenges. In the same way, our kids are different & unique in their temperament, emotional & intellectual wiring. The way you raise a first born, will be different from the last born.
Positional management
My parents ( especially my Mom), were really though on me as the first born, I had no space to manoeuvre out of their tight grip & that was because I was the first born. She usually tell me that if she gets it right with me, then I can lead my siblings right, but I noticed that she was really relaxed & lenient on the baby of the family…LOL!!
I am also tough on my son as the first born to keep him on the straight & narrow as I know his sister will copy whatever he does. We as parents need to be sensitive to this & ensure that the training is adapted accordingly.
My kids share the same room with different beds & themes ( The boy’s side is all action figure themed– Spiderman, Superman, etc, while the girl is all Disney princess et al), but the cleanliness of the room is my son’s responsibility as the older child. Sometimes, he tell me “Dad, my side of the room is clean, but my sister is not. Why are you annoyed with me?” My response is “Boy you are the first born, the older & the leader, get your sister to DO THE RIGHT THING or do it for her so that Daddy is happy with both of you”
Chore Management
As a boy I was trained on everything, cooking, cleaning, washing, using the needle & thread making the home conducive ( what you will consider a girl’s job) as well as the cutting of grass & trees, changing of light bulbs, washing the cars & fixing things ( typical boys chores) & that was the same for my sister too. My mother was gender agnostic when it came to chores, everybody did everything.
My wife & I are the same with our kids now. They are learning to be responsible & are void of that stereotype idea that some chores are for boys & others for girls.
As early as age 2-3, our kids began to take up house chores, they arrange their clothes, socks, pants, etc in the right boxes with no mix-ups they also arrange shoes & books in their right places, they set table mats at the dinning table, remove & clean them after eating & put them back in their right places. They know the appropriate place for each item in the house.In the last post I gave an example of my daughter at 2 years old observing & arranging shoes in the right corner of the living room, even visitors shoes too.
Before we got married, my wife & I had spend time reading up & learning from older couples how to train & raise kids in the right way, but we were fascinated by the results we got & later saw some books & articles that validated some of the things we did.
The picture below from New York Times (parenting.blogs.nytimes.com) depicts age appropriate chores for kids that we didn’t even know until I started research on this series & we got most of them right & adapted some of them accordingly.
Most of these points are interrelated, for example before giving your kids chores to do, you must firstly do it as an example of what & how you want it done. So you model what you want them to copy & do afterwards. It will be wicked to ask a child do something he/she doesn’t have a clue of how to do & to what degree of efficiency you want it done.
I love to measure the efficiency of things around me,what do I mean by that? I love to measure the distance my car can travel ( Miles or Km) for a certain amount of litres of fuel, I measure how long a 12.5 Kg of cooking gas will last by referencing the date we started using it, etc.
For chores, I do the same, considering that we learn more from pictures than words, I will do the chores the way & manner I want it done & then take a photo picture of it for my kids to study/memorise then I ask them to replicate it every time.
I learnt this in China in 2012 & started using it with my son who was 6 years old at the time, we did it in a fun way & I still use it till today.
As they grow older, the other thing is to also have a checklist of chores to do at certain times( e.g. Things to do before leaving for school, coming back from school & weekends).
Since my Son turned 9 a couple of years ago, he has a checklist of chores which he ultimately memorised as well as Ecclesiastes 3 v 1-8 “There is time for everything under the sun”
Are you modelling the right traits for your kids?
Are you managing your kids uniquely & correctly?
Next post, we will look at more areas of management.
This is my snippet, I AM SHALOMESQ!!!
Shalomesq Snippet 