Parenting In Focus: Lessons to teach your child

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Give some thought to the lessons you can teach your child. You may not be as proficient at teaching as your child’s regular teacher but you are far more efficient at teaching than you probably think you are. You are good at it because you do it everyday.

Think of lessons on kindness. Now is a good time to think about kindness as the City of Sequim has indicated it will focus on it. They even have signs around town to encourage all of us to become kinder.

Who is better equipped to talk with your child of any age about kindness than you are? Who is better able to model being kind than you? You have your child all day multiple days a week and you are the primary one who can be an example of someone being kind.

So what is kindness? Kindness is not just being nice.It is being selfless, caring, compassionate, and unconditionally kind. We share it through kind acts such as a smile or a nice word. It happens when we hold the door for someone, thank someone, offer to help someone, compliment someone or do any kind or simple thing for another person.

You demonstrate to your child about kindness when you do something for him. When you compliment him for doing a good job on his math paper or praise him when he pets the dog in a loving way you are showing him about kindness.

There are multiple lessons at home each day that can illustrate to your child what kindness is. If your child sees examples of kindness from you or from anyone, it is a lesson learned. It impacts not only your child but the person who he is being kind to and anyone who views this act of kindness. It makes the observers of the action more likely to try to be kind to others.

We all make mistakes and see others make mistakes. When these happen, we need to be careful in our response. We need to think before we speak, forgive the mistake maker, and think about the long-term relationship instead of perhaps the insult to our pride.

None of us are perfect. We can be a lot kinder to each other. With each attempt to be kinder we make a first step toward a more gentle and accepting society.

We need to talk with our children about random acts of kindness and how they impact our world. People and our kids especially, can learn kindness just by seeing what you do! We all need to practice, practice, practice. There is no better way to teach a child about kindness than to show it.

There are many examples of kindness. Just look at some of the words that mean the same thing: benevolence, care, compassion, concern, courteous, friendly, gentleness, goodness, goodwill, gracious, helpful, loving, neighborly, sweetness, sympathy, tenderness, thoughtfulness, understanding, unselfish. And you are the kindness teacher.

This is an important lesson. This is something that is most easily learned from parents who give examples of kindness every day. Because this is important, you need to be sure to focus on lessons about kindness.

Talk about it at dinner or when you are putting your child to bed. Talk about it when your child has a problem at school where someone is not very nice to them. Help him practice the response to someone who speaks rudely to him or who is not kind to him. Help him to learn how to reply in a ways that does not make things worse. Help him learn to reply in a kind way.

Lessons about kindness are as important as history or science. Let him hear from you about kindness but let him most see lessons about kindness from you.

We all need to be diligent about practicing kindness no matter what our age.

Cynthia Martin is the founder of the First Teacher program and former executive director of Parenting Matters Foundation, which publishes newsletters for parents, caregivers and grandparents. For more information, email to info@firstteacher.org or call 360-681-2250.