As the saying goes, the habit formed when you are young follows you to the pyre. To become healthy and responsible adults, it is necessary to grow up as emotionally sophisticated and confident individuals. Those who are emotionally sophisticated can face any problem head on. Being confident is as important as being emotionally sophisticated. If you are confident you can handle any situation with ease. The confident kid does not shy away from a situation or from a group, as he is sure about his skills and emotional capacity. You can make your kid emotionally sophisticated by inculcating in them habits like patience, self-reliance, responsibility, bonding and self control.
Now, let us see how each of these attributes contributes to the kid’s character and also how these skills can be cultivated. You being the parents need to take the responsibility along with their teachers to help the kid imbibe these qualities.
1. Patience
Teaching that patience pays off to kids is very important. At every step they need to show they possess this skill. May it be in school, playground, party or at home. Some ways to inculcate patience in kid is by giving them pocket money and encouraging them to save it. Tell them the more money they save, the better the purchase. You can also ask them to help you cook their favorite cake. This will teach them to wait till the cake is baked. And they are rewarded by having the cake. So this teaches them that patience brings good things.
2. Self-reliance
Making kids self reliant is very important as you may not always be around them to cater to their needs. And what is more important, is that they need to venture into a more open life very soon. So it’s better to be self reliant as early as possible. You can start with assigning them small chores to make them self reliant. You can encourage them to go to the nearest stores to buy something. This will make self reliant as well as teach them to handle the money properly. You can follow him for the first few times without giving any directions. Once you are sure that he has mastered the job, leave him alone and let him do things on his own.
3. Responsibility
You can start off by asking the kid to keep his things in place. For example once he returns from the school, he needs to keep his shoes in the shoe rack and bag in the place where it is to be kept. Ask the kid to arrange the toys in the shelf neatly. This is making the kid responsible for her belongings. It is also important to make the kid responsible for her actions. Support them to own up their mistakes and help them not to repeat it again. Let them admit the mistakes if they have done any. Don’t scold them when they admit it. Instead make them realize what they have done. You definitely need to support them in their studies. But you don’t have to do their home work. Just assist them to finish it themselves. This gives them a feeling of achievement and also makes them more responsible toward their studies.
4. Bonding
Man being a social animal, needs to mingle with the society. We need to start the socializing when one is very young. This makes it easier for the kids to get comfortable in a group. Your child needs to step into the society and meet other people. Most importantly, start making friends. It could be someone staying next door or his class mate or another kid whom he met in his extracurricular activities session. It is very important for the kid to have friends. While watching a movie or television show, you can show him examples of how a friend helps. Now you also need to teach him to decline what is not good. If the friend forces him to taste liquor or lift something from a shop, he should be capable of saying no to it. So make him understand about imbibing the good qualities from a friend and at the same time decline the wrong values.
5. Self-control
You need to tell your child that it is more important to participate and put in all his efforts, than win. The most popular performers focus on improving their performance each time than focusing on winning just once. You can also narrate to your kid, your own experience of being a loser. You can tell them how you learned from your experience and how it helped you the next time. Tell your kid that things do not always work the way he or she expects them to work. Help them cope with the situation instead. Here you are helping them to cope up with their disappointments. Ask them to take their own time to think before they react to a situation, which will also help them understand the consequences of their behavior. Parents need to be flexible when they lay out the rules. That is, the strategies need to be modified from time to time. Obtaining self control has to be a process which needs to develop slowly, and the end goal of self control is to help children in building their own self discipline and not to make them merely obey parents and teachers’ instructions. The children who are taught to control their anger and other emotional outbursts, are supposed to have lesser class room problems.
