Life is tough. That’s the bottom line. You can’t wrap this fact in candy or sugar coat it for your children.
If your children are not prepared for the big world when they grow up, they will more than likely have a very difficult time.
Think about the disasters in your life and how painful they were to get over. It will be no different for your children and maybe sometimes worse.
Resilience is the ability to endure in challenging circumstances and it pays to teach your children the skills they’ll need to survive and prosper in life.
So how can you make your children resilient?
1. It begins with love – not circuit training
The most important thing that children need to grow them into strong adults is to feel loved.
Of the tens of thousands of people who have sat in my consulting room in crisis and told me of their lives, it is the ones who felt loved as children that became the most resilient.
A child who is told every day they are loved grows up with a sense of being whole and develops good self-esteem.
Hold them, hug them, kiss them and implant in their minds that they are special and worthy so that your smiling, loving face stays with them forever.
2. Install a sense of discipline
What I mean here is the ability for children to apply themselves repetitiously to a task until they have seen it through to a successful conclusion.
All highly successful people have this quality.
Start very young and give your children regular routines whenever possible so they get a sense that there are things that need doing at certain times of the day or week.
Give them tasks that they must complete before they go on to leisure time. Only give them rewards for the tasks they have completed within the allotted time frame.
Remember, they are only children so don’t make it too hard but frame the tasks according to their abilities.
3. Ensure they are healthy and strong in their body
This is important so that children are up to the physical challenges they will face.
Encourage them to be involved in physical education, sports, dance, a martial art, or child yoga to help them grow strong in their body.
Do not expose them to smoking, drunken behaviour or drug taking – they are the children and you are the adult, so be the parent.
Add to this tuition in a mental discipline such as self-hypnosis, meditation and visualisation so they learn to program themselves for positive outcomes in the present and future.
4. Use positive talk
Don’t fill your children’s heads with negative criticism that they may carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Trust me: when they are sitting in my therapy chair they will be telling me everything you ever said to them.
Make sure you praise your children in positive, constructive ways so they get a sense of joy and pride about their achievements. This will encourage them to go out into the world with a sense of confidence they can achieve anything they set their mind to.
Your words and actions are the words and action they will be modelling in years to come.
5. Educate, educate, educate
I don’t mean just academically (although that’s important). Fill their minds with compassion, kindness, fascination and willingness to engage with other people.
Teach them social skills and beautiful manners so they can fit into any society. Survival in life often depends on the kindness of strangers, so make sure your children can have good conversations on range of topics with anyone they meet. Charming children are a joy to behold who grow up to be well adjusted adults.
Educate them to be flexible and adaptive in all circumstances so they can reinvent themselves whenever they need to. The law of attraction determines that adaptable, successful people attract other successful people and achieve their positive outcomes.
Some day your children will leave you, go out into the world and live their own lives. They will take with them the things you have taught them and the absence of what you didn’t teach them.
It’s a precarious road being a parent, letting go and seeing what your children become. One of the greatest gifts you can give them are the skills to become resilient.
This article was originally published on the Mum’s Delivery website as a guest post.
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