Raising Children Who Succeed
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It is one of the most powerful things any person alive can do, to choose to raise a child. Whether he or she is a genetically related child or one you have gained from another family, a child is a life long commitment. It’s worse than a puppy!
There is a well known saying that to have a child is to wear your heart forever outside your body. TO some extent that is true. Think teenage angst was bad? It’s noting on the first time you have to deal with your own child’s heartbreak!
With our busy lives it is so easy to become geared up to making sure our children have all the essentials covered, such as food, shelter, learning to read and write, and all those important jobs done, that we forget that so much of what our children need us for is for us to impart a spark of desire in them to succeed, to become all they were made to be.
It’s the drive of many parents to watch their child surpass them in their life in some way. Whether it is with a talent, a discovered passion, or their standard of living, children should be able to combine what they learn from our mistakes, and our life lessons with the lessons and opportunities they themselves face and collate them together to succeed.
To have a successful child we need to create a childhood that breeds success. The best part about this is it doesn’t cost you thousands of dollars in private school fees or in plenty of extra curricular activities. In fact with just a little time, some listening and a whole lot of talking you can beat those things in most part hands down.
Helping a child succeed in today’s world is a little different than it was a few generations ago. Back then, it was considered wise to teach your child to become a salary and wage earner, working in a stable job from the moment they left school until retirement.
Success was measured by how long you stayed in the same job. Consistency and stability were the favoured attributes.
Then it was all about working your way up, about starting out in the business, any business and working your way up to the top, not worrying about whose toes you may step on on the way.
More recently things have changed. The more recent generations coming out of school accept they will probably have at least four to five career changes over the course of their life. They know how to flaunt their talents and sell themselves and aren’t too scared to do it.
These kids, the ones who succeed today, are good at finding the gaps in the market and driving towards them. They’ll walk from a job that doesn’t offer them a good mix of lifestyle opportunities, perks and career advancement. They often prefer to work to contract than be tied to a permanent position. Security and consistency aren’t words in their employment vocabulary.
This is important t understand as you look at raising your own children. This current generation seeking employment may have different attributes than the one your child will be in, but it’s likely to be more in mine with how it will be than the generations of your parents and of yourself.
Our children today are growing up with a very different world view than the one we once had. They want to be self employed, own their own businesses, and pursue creative endeavors. While of course some children still veer to traditional roles, the majority of children feel attracted to roles that were previously seen as just for those creative types. Even jobs in IT can be incredibly interactive and creative, and children in our technological ages are attracted to them
How Do We Define Success?
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Of course simply said, our child is a success if they grow to be healthy, happy and able to be independent of us. However for most of us, while we say that is all we want for our children, it’s not all we expect from them
Take a moment to look at your own life/ How do you measure your own success? Is it through the type of possessions you own, the work you do, the way you life your life? Is it your relationships, your children? Think about what you feel is a success in your life and write them down.
The amazing thing about parenting is that we teach our children even when we don’t mean to. So that list of your own successes are important. It gives you a starting point of what your child is already learning form you about what is important in your life, and they will follow it.
Once you have created your lists read over it once more and think about how you learnt those elements of success. Put them into groups – emotional, spiritual, and physical and economics. This report will help look at all of these as a group, but it’s important to consider them individually to begin with.
We all have different areas that we consider are the moment important to measure our success in. For some finding one person to spend the rest of your life with, raising children together, maybe the pinnacle of your success. For another it maybe growing a business and becoming the CEO of a world wide organization, and for another it may be working with a group of people who need the services f someone committing a lifetime of free work alongside them. All of these are important. All of them add to the world we live in.
TO create a successful child, we need first to recognize that success isn’t just about being the richest child on the block. It’s about awakening the inert dreams and hopes each one of our children hold inside their heart and bringing them to life. If we do this, then our children will succeed.
While our children will copy us, and follow us, they are not carbon copies of us. Even if you’ve come from a long line of doctors, and you yourself are one, it doesn’t mean your daughter is going to be the same. Once we have worked out how WE measure success and what values we want to share with our children through our modeling of those measures, we then need to acknowledge they are a separate person from us, and still may go a completely different route.
The precise nature of how they show their success isn’t as important as how they carry out any task before them. The skills we need to run an NGO in a third world country are very similar to those of running a business or a home. It’s just placing them in a different context.
To succeed children need to be able to work with a wide range of people (have good people management and leadership skills), to be able to identify a problem and then also have an idea of how they can go about solving it. This combination is a winning success formula suitable to a variety of ways your child may display their success.
Children need our expectations and our ability to call out of them positive attributes, but they don't need us to carve out a specific future for them. They are able, even at a young age to do that themselves.
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