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Helping Your Children to Grow Up Happy, Confident and Successful

There are many ways to explain values to children and to help them understand them and learning early in life about the principles of success. These methods don't require that you do all the talking, just that you guide the learning process so your children can picture your priority values for themselves. Part of the picture is knowing which behaviors demonstrate the value and which demonstrate the opposite.

One of your jobs as a parent is to explain your values in behavioral terms. Help your children recognize the emotional results of behaving in accordance with each value. In other words, it feels good to do the right thing. It is true that wise decisions make us feel good inside. And our actions affect the feelings of friends and parents. Help your children learn to recognize that making wise decisions helps them feel good about themselves.

Your goal is to help your children develop a positive emotional response to adopting each of your values. When your child comes home from school and proudly tells you how well he or she did on a spelling or history test, express your positive response, then affirm your child's positive response. Say, "When you work hard and do well, you feel proud, don't you?" Then ask, "What else do you feel?" Encourage children to identify as many positive feelings that come from acting on one of the values you have been teaching. Encourage them to bask in those positive feelings. During supper, invite them to share what they did and how good it made them feel. Express your positive thoughts so the entire family can understand how you respond to positive behaviors and choices.

Let your children know how pleased, happy, excited, thrilled, joyous, satisfied, and proud you are when they demonstrate your values. And you also may let them know how disappointed, displeased, unhappy, depressed, sad, upset, angry, and embarrassed you are when they act on values that are opposite from yours. The focus of the emotional response must be the behavior, not the child. Don't say, "I am unhappy when you are a bad boy."

Instead say, "Even though I love you, when you are unkind, I feel very disappointed." This way it becomes more clear to your child that you are rejecting the behavior, not the child. It is important to explain why you feel disappointed, angry, or sad. If your explanation makes sense to your child, it will have greater impact on the future. Give the positive feedback both individually to your child and in front of the rest of the family, but only give negative feedback individually. A good rule is: 'Praise in public; correct in private.'

Another aspect is helping your children know that other people will respond emotionally to what they do and how they behave. The primary responder will be the person who is directly affected by the behavior: the friend who is treated unkindly, the schoolmate with whom your child is unselfish, the friend who discovers your child to be loyal, and the child at school who is positively impacted by your child's self-control.