Character Building Lessons You Want Your Kids to Learn

Progress not perfection… Be thankful for what you have… It’s okay not to win… Embrace differences… Follow your own path… It’s okay to cry… We all have life lessons that we hope to instill in our kids. Many of you shared yours with Janet on Facebook recently. What are the most effective ways to teach these lessons? As with all aspects of parenting, the answers may not be as clear and simple as we expect. Janet offers her perspective and advice in this episode. 

 

Transcript of “Character Building Lessons You Want Your Kids to Learn”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about important life lessons we want our kids to learn. And I’m going to do something I’ve never done, which is invite you to do a little exercise around this topic by just taking a moment to think, What life lessons do you want your child to learn? What feels really important to you? What’s coming up for you? I’ll give you a moment.

I decided to reach out on my Facebook page with that question and I got an overwhelming amount of wonderful responses. Thank you to all of you! Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to even read all of them in the end, I think it’s up to maybe 350 last time I looked. But the ones that I did read, I’ve categorized here so that I can talk about them and what we can do to ensure our children learn these lessons.

I believe what’s coming up for us with this question are our own yearnings for what we wish was instilled in us, what we wish others had given us. Especially maybe our parents, the most influential others in our life. And we could look at this as one of the reasons we wanted to have children: Because we have this hope and wish that we can instill things in them that weren’t instilled in us, that we can give them things that we wish that we had. So they say a lot about us, these ideas that we want to instill in our children, right?

Here are the categories that I came up with to try to sort all these different responses that I got. First—and this was the most popular one, there were many, many, many comments about this—Faith in our process. Process, not perfection. Keep trying. That things aren’t going to be perfect, that it’s okay to make mistakes, we just keep going. Lots of you want to instill that in your children, and I do too. I can relate to that.

Another one that’s sort of related to that, I call it no pain, no gain, which is a term that I think started in the eighties when aerobics classes became popular. That’s what I’m thinking, I could be wrong. No pain, no gain. Go for it. That’s another category that I sorted these into. And then I think that the 2020s version of that is we can do hard things.

Next, a lot of you talked about appreciation of differences, tolerance, inclusion. Also, related to that, kindness and compassion for others. Very important to a lot of you to instill in children. Respecting people’s boundaries and establishing your own. There were a few on that. And that sort of branches into we can’t always get what we want, life doesn’t always go our way. And then another category, gratitude. I believe we all want our children to be grateful for what they have and appreciate it. It’s okay to cry. And then a lot of you hope to instill in your child self-worth. Trust yourself. Be yourself.

So how do children learn these things? It’d be nice if they would just learn it if we just said those words to them. Be yourself. You don’t need to be perfect. It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to make mistakes. Just keep trying, keep going. Be grateful for what you have. Be nice to people. Everybody’s different and that’s so great. Embrace differences. But that’s not how children learn, right? You’ve probably heard me say here before that the main ways that children learn these kinds of values and character traits is through our modeling. That means being it ourselves and being it with other people that our child observes us with. And most importantly of all, being it with our child. We need to treat them this way.

Besides modeling, the other way, and this can be the hardest part, is to trust their process. Which is really this first category that you all brought up, right? Progress, not perfection. Keep trying. Our child has their own unique learning process and it can be hard to be patient and trust all the bumps along the way.

And then as we’re modeling and we’re trusting our child’s process, there will be reasonable boundaries that come into this. For instance, in the case of instilling in a child a love of books, a love of stories, a love of reading, we want to model that, right? That means that we not only read to our child, but they see us reading. Maybe we’re reading on a Kindle, maybe we’re reading a magazine or a newspaper instead of always being on our phone. So in that modeling, there are boundaries there for us, and then there’ll be boundaries for our child. The boundaries there for us are that we maybe want to be on our phone all the time and we put it down periodically and do use other kinds of media.

And the second part of teaching: as we’re trusting our child’s process, we’ll want to have reasonable boundaries for them. I did a reel on this on Instagram about sparking a love of reading. A parent asked about it, and I was responding to that. And then I got another question from someone saying, “My child is reading all the time. We have the opposite problem. They’re reading during meals, they’re reading when it’s time to brush their teeth. They just want to have a book there. And I don’t want to discourage that.” And I responded back, well, reasonable boundaries don’t discourage that, they actually encourage it. And your child may be unconsciously asking for you to say, “You can go right back to that, but I’m going to ask you to please put it down while we’re eating. I don’t want that at the table.” Or, “Now we’re going to do toothbrushing, and then you get to go right back to your book.”

Now let’s go through some of these because I was so impressed with them. I got teary with some of these because the things you wrote were eloquent. Number one, Faith in our process. Progress, not perfection. Keep trying. Jesi said: “For my 11-year-old, we always use the phrase practice makes progress. Never practice makes perfect because we know that perfect is a myth. When they were smaller, they were perfectionists to the point of it being a problem and causing them lots of anxiety and tears, and I knew we needed to change that. We’ve also been using progress, not perfection in the same vein. We both have ADHD and can become paralyzed when a task feels too big. When we prioritize progress, we know that some days we can only do a little, but it’s still progress and still worth celebrating.” Great sentiment there.

Another parent, Rachel, said: “I’ve made up songs to teach the important lessons that I feel my children personally need. So when I saw my son was struggling with perfectionism, my song began like this: You’re human, only human, you’ll make the odd mistake. And went on to briefly outline the usefulness of making mistakes. We’re into song number four now. What I love, when one of my three is struggling with an issue, another will spontaneously launch into the appropriate song. They even made up their own for when my youngest kept worrying. The power of combining music with social-emotional skills is not to be underestimated.” And she winks.

Someone else, Im-im, said: “There are no failures, only lessons.” Someone else said: “Mistakes are how you learn.” And then this one I really love: “We say perfect is boring to our perfectionist-inclined five-year-old. And you don’t have to be the best, just try your best. We also constantly remind her of things she’s improved on through practice, like handwriting and bike-riding.” Somebody else said: “It’s okay to fail.” So it sounds like these parents are having success with these ideas and I love that they shared them.

The hard part in this for a lot of us is that this process that we want to encourage in our child, this effort where we don’t want them to worry about failure, where we don’t want them to worry about being perfect, is very messy. And often there will be meltdowns and quitting and them wanting to be perfect so badly and having to let go of that themselves. We can’t talk them out of these things. That’s the rough part of this. We wish we could just say, “You don’t have to be perfect!” But they have to explore this themselves, with us not believing they need to be perfect in their process to not being perfect, if you know what I’m saying. Trusting the process, with all the emotions that are expressed, with all the giving-up moments that they have. Not trying to tell them they have to keep going, but really allowing them to come to this themselves. That’s how children believe in it. Not because we manage it for them, but because they go through the whole gamut. And that’s the hard thing for us as parents.

And in areas like this and some of these others that I’m going to talk about, for some of us, the modeling part is easier than the trusting-their-process part, or it can be the other way around. For example, maybe trusting their process is easier in being perfect because we still have that issue kind of, we’re trying to let go of it. So we’re not modeling it as completely as we want to be, but we’re finding it in ourselves to trust our child because this is so important to us that we do allow them to have their own process around letting go of perfection. And then by doing so, sometimes they can teach us. We’ve seen how it works in them, and then we’re able to give that back to ourselves. So that’s how that can work.

The next category I’m going to read about: No pain, no gain. Go for it. Let’s say that was instilled in us and maybe not in the healthiest way. We had to do all the hard things first to get the rewards. But now when our child doesn’t want to do that because they have their own process and they’re saying, No, I don’t want to do that, I just want to do this other thing. It’s hard to be patient with that process because maybe it was instilled in us that that’s the way we were a good person for our parents. That’s the way we’re acceptable, that’s the way we’re most loved, that they approve of us. And now it can be kind of triggering when our child isn’t doing it. There are a lot of interesting layers to this and we’re absolutely not going to be perfect in any aspect of this, but it will help us if we keep that awareness antenna up. That we’re able to self-reflect, so we can look at some of the projections and things that we have, our own feelings of investment, of wanting to instill these things in our children, and how that might even be getting in the way of us actually doing it.

No pain, no gain. Let’s talk about that one. Susie said: “It takes work and struggle sometimes to earn the positive result. Kid example: had to walk five blocks on a recent vacation, hot and sandy, but the ice cream was incredible. Or parking took forever but worth it for a really fun time. Grocery shopping is not fun and exciting, but it’s how you get things to make yummy dinners and snacks. Eating right and exercise are not fun in the moment, but lead to feeling better and having more energy down the road.” These are all great things to tell children, but they have to experience it themselves. And it isn’t going to be helpful to expect them to not complain about that because we expect them to be already thinking, Oh, well this is what I have to do to get my good result. No! They’re going to be whining and struggling, and part of trusting their process is to allow them to do all that. Not losing our temper, not getting annoyed. Just carrying on. Letting them have their feelings, and removing ourselves from that emotionally however we can so that it doesn’t get to us. Stop it! We’re going to get the ice cream and this is what you have to do to get ice cream.

Let them discover that it was worth it. Let them discover if they had to join you grocery shopping that, Yeah, this is a drag. What can I do to make this easier for you while we get the stuff to make dinner? Or, Is there something here you want to add to the dinner? We can include our child that way. But again, not expecting that they’re going to have this smooth way to getting this life lesson. They’re going to have their own bumpy process.

Natalia said: “These are two Russian wisdoms that I learned as a child and that I teach my child as well.” And she said them in Russian and then she translated: “Get the job done and you can relax with peace of mind. And the other one is: The eyes fear, but the hands get the work done. My son likes to procrastinate homework, but then cries himself to sleep knowing it is not complete and that he will receive a comment from his teacher. So I often say these sayings to him, which basically mean, do it now and relax for the rest of the day and enjoy your play. It only looks scary, but you are actually quite fast with it.” To me, those are examples of lovely reminders that aren’t trying to impose on a child’s process, to rush it, to judge them. These are the kinds of comments that help a child see something without pointing a finger at them. And they’re very much on the child’s side, they’re on the child’s team. Not at all implying, You should feel like this. You should want to do this.

And then here’s an alternate view on no pain, no gain, but I love this. Jackie said: “If I can figure out how to rephrase it for a small child, I feel strongly about Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing half-assed. I got way too much Do your best! Give 110%! messaging and took it way too literally. You should pretty much never actually do your best. Most situations do not deserve your best. Don’t kill yourself trying.” I love that, right? That’s a relieving message instead of the pressurizing message that those other ones that she got were. That’s the thing, knowing what messages we may have gotten from our parents will really help us to clear the air and not project anything with our child.

Tolerance, appreciation of differences. It’s okay to disagree. Is it okay for our child to disagree with us while we still hold boundaries? Children need to. And that’s usually about them yelling, stomping their feet, having a meltdown. That’s how we show them it’s okay to disagree. If we’re going to change our mind because you’re doing that, that’s not letting them disagree, right? That’s saying, I need you to be in agreement with me, I’m not comfortable with you disagreeing.

Learn about and embrace the differences in others. Yes. I think they have to discover this on their own and without our judgment. When they’re noticing the difference in others and maybe talking to us about it in ways that we don’t think are correct or whatever, to try not to get reactive and judge them for that, but really explore with them where they’re coming from. We’re allowing them to have a process around that, too.

Kindness and compassion for others. This is what people said: “Always stand up for people who need help.” Corrina said: “Our family motto for nearly every situation is Be nice and I love you.” I would just be careful about the be nice because when we say to children be nice or you’re not being nice, a very young child will feel that we’re saying they’re not nice. It’s really hard for them to separate themselves from those kinds of terms. It’s better to stop them and say, “I can’t let you, I won’t let you do this,” or “That could be hurting their feelings.” Not things that put labels on them in any way. Again, we’re not going to be perfect at this, but it’s something to think about. “How you treat others says more about you than them.” Yeah, that’s a really good one for us to know as parents, too. Because if our child doesn’t feel comfortable inside, if they’re not feeling secure in our love at that moment, they’re not going to be able to be at their best.

Respect people’s boundaries and establish your own. That’s my category. And Emily Kate said: “No is a complete sentence.” I love that one. “If someone asks you to stop, stop.” No is a complete sentence, that has to come from us, right? That we’re saying no. And we’re not expecting our child necessarily obliges, but we’re holding that boundary, we’re not trying to talk them into giving us permission to say no. We’re allowed to just say, “No, I don’t want you to.” And if someone asks you to stop, stop, often that’ll be us stopping our child. And that’s how they learn, through our boundaries. Through being what I was talking about the other week, being strict with our boundaries, which means having conviction in them.

And this one sort of veers into We can’t always get what we want, life doesn’t always go our way. Amy said: “A big one I’ve been trying to teach my six-year-old is sometimes we have to do things even if we don’t want to, such as her going to school and me going to work. That sometimes it doesn’t matter what we want, but instead it only matters what needs to be done.” Jessica said: “Not every day is going to be your favorite. Not every meal is going to be your favorite. Not every person is going to be your favorite. We need to learn to cope with life being less than ideal. Plus that helps us appreciate the favorites even more.” And Carly said: “Hard times are temporary and help is available. Keep telling people how you feel. Don’t keep it to yourself.”

These are all experiential learning that our child needs to have, right? It’s great that we also share that This is what I’ve learned, I’ve learned that not every day is going to be my favorite, and personalize it that way. But we don’t want to obviously lecture them and we don’t want to tell them that it’s not okay for you to complain about this not being your favorite or it’s not okay for you to gripe about the things that you have to do. We’re trusting their process. And we’re also showing them that not every day is going to be our favorite. We’re modeling that by allowing them to complain in ways that aren’t our favorite so that they can learn these things.

A lot of this also is believing in your child that they will learn it, believing in the good in them and all the good things you’ve already instilled just by caring for them and being consistent and doing your best to be there and being imperfect for them. And bringing that up: I wish I’d done this and I did that. I learned something. Sharing our process is a very powerful way to model.

And It’s okay not to win. If we’re telling our child that when they’re upset about losing, that’s not going to help them learn that. In fact, it can make this into a sore spot, unfortunately. They felt judged for being upset. Maybe they’re over-the-top upset and that worries us, right? Because we want them to learn this so badly. But they won’t learn it the way we want them to. They might learn it with a lot of shame around it, and we don’t want that. So for them to learn it the way we want them to, in a healthy way, which may not have been the way we learned it, we have to allow for that first category. We have to allow for the messy, emotional, up and down, not a straight line. In a way, these life lessons are easier to learn than we think, and in another way, they’re harder, right? Because there’s awareness of where we’re getting in the way. That’s the challenge.

Gratitude. Somebody said: “Learn to be truly thankful for what you already have without always expecting more.” Children learn that, again, not by us having judgments about their process or shaming them into it, of course, but we don’t try to appease them with more. We show them, This is what we have. And you really want there to be more. Yeah, that’s hard, but this is all we’ve got now. “I’m trying to teach my kids not to be selfish or self-entitled. I don’t know how, but definitely trying to bring their attention to certain things as they occur.” I’d be really careful around that, especially when we’re using words like be selfish or be self-entitled. Those are kind of fixed ideas. And when we tell a child, You’re being this, that is telling them they are that. It’s a hard one to teach because children are very self-centered when they’re very young. And if we start judging them for that, that’s going to tend to make them hold on more and want more to fill this feeling of disapproval that they’re getting from us. So this is something that we teach them by not being indulgent, by us caring for others, us caring for them, especially in terms of not wanting you to be a certain way because I want you to be that way. Having patience for when you are behaving in a way that is selfish. And that’s how I would use it, behaving in a way that is selfish, not you are this. And children behave in ways that are selfish and entitled when they’re not feeling good about themselves.

That’s what throws off a lot of these lessons, defeats them, is that our child isn’t feeling that sense of being able to trust themselves and their gut. But none of these are taught from the outside in, they’re all taught from the inside out. So yes, we’re modeling, but then a child has to come to them of their own volition and through their own experiences.

It’s okay to cry. That one has modeling written all over it, right? Saying that can be very different from really showing that. And I talk about that a lot on this podcast because all of these are things that we really need to show them and for them to experience. And is it okay to be angry with your parent? Is it okay to stomp your feet and be so frustrated that you shout and scream? Is all of that okay? Because all of that goes together and it’s a huge part of all of these other lessons that we want our children to learn. It is us trusting the process, allowing them to have all the feelings that go along with it. So it’s okay to cry is closely tied to everything.

This is what this parent said, their name is Mims: “It’s okay to cry and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently. You can feel your feelings and let it out.” Brilliant message. We’ve got to believe that one-hundred percent, though, for it to take hold, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. In fact, almost all my podcasts are about this on some level because this is the key to all of these other traits. It needs to be okay for them to feel ungrateful. It needs to be okay for them to be mad that they’re not getting what they want, life’s not going their way. It needs to be okay for them to not want to do the hard things, give up, want to be perfect or not do it at all. Yelling at us about it when it’s not going well for them. Those are all parts of the process, unfortunately!

And then there was an opposing viewpoint on this. Which, I don’t hear this so often anymore, so I feel like that’s a good thing. But opposing viewpoint, this person wants their child to learn: “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” Everybody used to say that, right? You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. That’s the opposite of it’s okay to cry. So we can’t teach both of those. And we really can’t teach any of these without it being okay to cry and have all the other feelings, in my opinion.

Here’s another one that’s behind all of these. It’s integral to us instilling all these other lessons: Trust yourself. Be yourself. Self-worth. One of you said: “Trust your gut. Follow your own path. Each in their own time.” Corine said: “Self-worth isn’t something you need to learn. You are worthy because you are.” Melissa said: “Confidence and self-esteem are unrelated to others’ opinions. One thing I practice with my four-year-old is repeating the mantra I am who I am and that’s enough. I’ll start that same one with my two-year-old son.” Ashley said: “I tell my seven-and-a-half-year-old, who is me as a child without the reformed me as a parent, that comparison is the thief of joy. Worrying about what others think of us and what someone else has or can do in comparison to us will rob us of the journey to finding out our strengths and abilities. It’s not easy to explain sometimes it’s okay to be competitive and use other people’s strengths to find our energy to be better and achieve more, but sometimes it can be defeating.”

All of these are things we want to show children that we believe in terms of them. Each in their own time. That’s trusting our child’s process. Trust your gut. That means we’ve got to trust their gut and we’ve got to trust their instinct, with reasonable boundaries. Maybe they’re not comfortable with somebody that has differences that we would hope they’d embrace, but they’re not comfortable. We can tell them, “You should embrace differences. You should want to enjoy these other people,” but our child doesn’t. That’s where us trying to teach these lessons can interfere with other lessons and even interfere with that lesson that we’re trying to teach them.

Follow your own path. This is a really interesting one because a lot of us have this, we want our child to be yourself. And parents have asked me questions over the years about their child who is imitating another child, and maybe it’s a child who’s particularly annoying and maybe they want to do everything another child’s doing. Or they’re imitating the baby, they’re talking baby talk. And we want to say, Be yourself. Don’t be them. But that is being themselves. Being themselves right then is wanting to explore imitating another child or acting like a baby. So that is being themselves. I know I’m really getting in the weeds here, but it’s just so interesting at the layers and how, without meaning to, we can I guess you’d call it miseducate, in terms of teaching these lessons. It’s a challenge. So this is something they learn through experience and our modeling, to trust that they can trust themselves and that they can be themselves even when being themselves isn’t something we want them to be at that moment.

And Alexandra said it this way: “Only within you can you find your answers. And until you learn how to fully listen to your intuition, mama and daddy will help guide you. We are still learning too.” And she said: “I believe in that idea myself, but I am on the path of modeling that to my daughter.” That’s a beautiful message right there. We will help guide you. We will have the boundaries, we will guide you through our modeling, but it’s all inside you. You’re the one that has to come to this. You’re the one that has the answers. You’re the one to trust, and we want you to listen to your intuition.

Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.