How To Set Goals With Your Kids
It is a sad reality that most parents do not see how important setting goals is. This might be because of how society sees the act of goal setting – it is something that only adults do.
We were all kids once before, so we know that kids would rather spend a whole afternoon playing or watching TV instead of reading or doing assignments. Add that natural thing to parents who do not teach their kids the value of setting goals, and what you have are kids who do not know how to set their own goals all their life.
As parents, it is our responsibility to guide our kids to set goals and show them the importance of achieving them as well. It is not their teachers’ responsibility, because their job is to judge kids based on grades and examinations. That is why us, parents play a vital role in our kids goal setting habit. Our kids should not only be book smart, but become well quipped adults in the future as well.
However, we have to remember that our sense of time is different from our kids. We should be very careful at suggesting deadlines and time limits. We might take two weeks as something very quick, but for our 7-year old daughter, it could mean forever. We have to be sensitive to how old our child is when we help them create a time frame.
It will help if we encourage our kids to list down their goals on paper. But writing down goals is not enough, we have to help them realize why such goal is important and what happens if the goal is achieved.
But the most important thing to remember of all is to let your children be the ones to think of the ideas for their own goals, as much as possible. If you want to make suggestions, make sure to be sensitive with their age and interests.
If you decide for your child, the goals will most likely be short term instead of long term. If you feel that the goal is too big for your child to accomplish just yet, you can try and break it into mini-goals so that they can see progress quickly, even on a daily basis if possible.
We have to help our kids set and reach their goals. We have to work with them, but we should be careful not to take over. We have to make sure that we do not get too involved in such a way that our child will depend on us on finishing their goals. We can get involved just enough though so that our kids will feel our support and our interest in what they are doing, but we should be careful not to let them think that we will do it for them.
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