One of the most important jobs parents have is teaching their children how to act in the world. There’s more at stake than values. It’s important for everyone to know how to behave in different situations. Each grownup has many different roles. You are a parent, a relative, a partner, an employee, a citizen, a friend, and goodness knows what else. As you ready your child for adult life, you will want him to understand what each role entails.
For starters, ask yourself what your child learns from you. Let’s say you have a rough day at the office. Perhaps your boss was unfair—didn’t listen to your side of the story or micromanaged you or put you down (just a few examples). How do you talk about it when you get home?
When you reach the dinner table, do you stab at the air with a fork and rail against the injustice of a fate that left you at the mercy of such an ogre? More generally, do you blame something or somebody else for everything that goes wrong? Or do you take a more philosophical stance, express outrage, acknowledge some ownership at least occasionally, and look for constructive ways of dealing with the issues?
Your child is watching. It has been said that children are the world’s best observers and the world’s worst interpreters. Talk to your child. Use your experience, past and present, to draw explicit inferences for her so that she sees how your actions reflect your and society’s expectations.
Teach your child respect for authority. To do so, you will need to identify authority figures in different walks of life—not just parent and teacher and adult and policeman but also minister, mayor, and elderly person, for example. In each case, you can proactively prepare your child for success in the wider world. Perhaps you want him to remove his baseball cap, extend his hand, and introduce himself. Perhaps you want him, under circumstances that you specify, to make an offer of help: can I carry that for you? let me open that door, unscrew that jar lid, or pick up that newspaper. Whatever the skill, don’t just tell the child. Start rehearsing it when he is very young.
One of the most basic skills is listening. Consider what you regard as proper procedure in this area (your answer will depend in part on your culture). You might, for example, expect your child to stop playing, look at you while you are speaking, listen until you have finished, and then reply.
If you want your child to learn this skill, have her practice it—not because the instructions are complicated but to ensure that they stay in memory. (We remember what we do better than what we merely see or hear.) You can create a fun and low-key learning environment by having two people in your family demonstrate the skill while the others watch, critique, and then take a turn as performers. If you have your child rehearse skills in this way, you can refer to the rehearsal (an event in memory) when you remind her of behavior that you expect to see in a specific situation, for example, on a visit to see Aunt Mary in the nursing home or a trip to church or a shopping expedition at Wal-Mart.
I believe that parents, pressed for time, often make the mistake of expecting children to display skills that have not been taught. Have you shown your child how you want the trash to be emptied? how the dog should be fed? how (and where) to put one toy away before bringing out more? how to wash the dishes? (At age sixty I still remember my father showing me at age ten how to dry the cast iron skillet and how to wipe down the kitchen counters before leaving the room!)
As you take stock of desirable skills, don’t forget the bigger stuff. You want your child to know how to set limits with peers and how to compromise. He also needs to know how to apologize. You don’t want him just to say he’s sorry; you want him to show that he understands what he did wrong and to offer to make amends. Something else he needs to know is how to ask you, the parent, to revisit an unpopular decision. “What would I need to do?” is usually a more fruitful approach than “Come on! That’s not fair!” or “That’s stupid! You just don’t understand!” (Once you’ve said no and meant it, you may want to give him one, and only one, “right of appeal.”)
As you identify different skills, take a moment in each case to jot down the steps you want your child to follow during the rehearsal. The listening example just given might go as follows:
- Stop what you are doing
- Face me and make eye contact
- Listen without interrupting me
- When I finish, repeat in a few words what I just said
- Reply
To learn more about breaking skills down into steps, look at Skillstreaming the Elementary School Child: New Strategies and Perspectives for Teaching Prosocial Skills by Ellen McGinnis and Arnold P. Goldstein and Skillstreaming the Adolescent: New Strategies and Perspectives for Teaching Prosocial Skills by Arnold P. Goldstein and Ellen McGinnis.
Once you have targeted key skills, analyzed them, and rehearsed them, you will want to reinforce them. The best way of doing so is to notice—as often as you can—what your child is doing right. You want to make a big fuss over the blue ribbon performances. In fact, you could do worse than to praise your child each day for five feats. “I am so proud of you,” you will say. “You did a great job of handling that situation!” Your child will beam with pleasure.
Last and crucially important, you want your offspring to be able to handle mistakes. To teach this essential life skill, you must first be able to detach from your own sometimes powerful emotions in the face of your child’s screw-up. If you go ballistic—turn red in the face and start yelling—your child’s takeaway message will be that you sometimes become scary. When you are scary, your behavior commands more attention than your words.
Instead, take a deep breath and calmly encourage your child to describe the mishap. Then ask what he hoped the result would be. Invite your child to tell you how the actual outcome differed from what he had envisioned. See whether, with help, he can learn from his mistakes. You want him to strategize to get a better result in the future (and to repair whatever damage may have been done). If your child has difficulty taking responsibility when he is at fault, you can express surprise that the blameless behavior he is describing produced a result so greatly at odds with what might have been anticipated, given his description of events.
Your goal in all cases should be to reward honesty and to discourage dishonesty (remember that conversation about values?). You also want to normalize mistakes and to help your child see them as opportunities for change. Above all you want to keep well-intentioned blunders from arousing feelings of guilt, shame, or inadequacy. We all make mistakes—there is no room in this world for perfect people—and we all need to be able to pick ourselves up and move on with our self-respect intact. Your child will not be able to forgive others if he cannot be charitable with himself.
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