With or without basic life coaching training, the responsibility of coaching your kids to do literary everything in life lies squarely under your parenthood docket. If you opt to do stuff for them instead of coaching them to manage on their own, you may end up messing up their future. I mean; for how long will you tie their shoelaces? If you don’t teach your teenage kid how to cook, how will he or her cook for your grandchildren? If you are still bathing your 10-year old, when will he or she ever learn general hygiene? Bottom line, the only way of showing love to your kid is to teach him or her everything they need to know in readiness for adulthood.
Training your kids to be responsible adults isn’t the easiest thing to do. You need to be tough sometimes, tender at other times, consistent with your instructions, understanding when they fail, and patient with them throughout their learning curve. You also need to be their number one role model, so you must be ready to step in and help them out whenever they call for your help. But again, the reward of teaching them well is too precious for you to feel overwhelmed by the process. Here are some of the benefits you will accrue from teaching your child to be responsible:
1. Your kid is able to lead a healthy lifestyle
Being responsible means that your kid will be too busy doing important things – cooking, gardening, exercising, etc- that he or she will have limited time for TV and the internet. That is one way of getting them off the sofa and protecting them from the risk of getting obese at a young age. Besides that, teaching your kids how to cook is one way of discouraging them from eating junk foods while you are away. Training them to observe oral hygiene saves their teeth from future damages. All these, among others, will help the child to fight off diseases and at the same time save you money in form of reduced medical expenditure.
2. You prepare him or her for the job market/business world
This goes without saying: if your kid is struggling with meeting deadlines, be it for school work or household chores, chances are that he/she will find it rough later in life when tackling deadlines at work. By the way, are you talking to them about the importance of finding a paying job when they become of age? Are you encouraging them to learn a second language? How are you teaching them to manage finances? What about how to set realistic goals and be bound by them? Have you been discussing their academic future with them? About conflict resolution and treating people well regardless of their social status, how prepared are they for it? All these will prepare your kid for the job market and business world.
3. The kid develops a thick skin for future criticism
The world is full of people who love throwing jabs at other people for no apparent reason. There are also those who criticize others in a bid to make them better. Teaching your kid responsibilities prepares him or her to deal with all these people. He/she is able to use positive criticism to his/her advantage and then block negative criticism from ruining his/her life. Start criticizing his/her actions as early as now, but ensure that you criticize positively and with lots of love.
4. They learn how to fix problems in the future
Kids will always get into trouble. Although it is okay to fix their messes when they are young, it is imperative that you teach them how to take care of their troubles later in life. Is he in trouble with the teacher? Keep distance and let him handle that on his own. Are the siblings fighting over something? Watch from a distance as they try to resolve their differences and only step in to help when you realize that they may not succeed at it.
5. You sow a seed of independent thinking early enough
If you are anything like me, you definitely hate sycophancy with a passion. I mean, people who cannot think on their own without following the crowd always make the most irresponsible decisions. That is the last thing you would wish for your kid. Teaching him or her to be responsible, say cook dinner, trains him/her to start making decisions from a tender age. There are vital decisions they will make in your absence and if you have trained them to trust their instincts and decisions, then that becomes their way of thinking later in life.
Because teaching to be responsible is a tough thing to do, a little life coaching training would come in handy. There are companies that can help you with this training so that you can help your kids to be better people later in life.