Teaching your child responsibility is crucial to building their self-confidence and helping them achieve happiness down the road. But teaching responsibility isn’t always so straightforward. It’s tempting to do things for your child when they’re having difficulties or to otherwise prevent them from growing on their own.
While this is a natural response, there are ways you can help your child to grow, take accountability and learn self-sufficiency. To help you teach your child responsibility, we’ve outlined several actions you can take below.
Create a Schedule
A schedule helps your child understand what they should be doing at any given time. While you don’t want to go overboard measuring every minute of your child’s day, giving them some structure with a basic outline of their week can help them stay on track and build healthy habits.
As you outline a schedule, however, you may want to take into account your child’s opinion. You might choose to help them build their schedule on their own. Make it a collaborative process so they can understand the importance of the activities that they choose to fit into their routine.
Take a Step Back
It’s natural that, when your child is stressed or unhappy, you try to relieve them of their discomfort. That said, if you’re always hovering over your child, solving their problems for them and preventing them from making mistakes, this can do more harm than good. Sometimes it’s better to let your child remain accountable for their actions so that they can learn from their mistakes in the future.
But remember that taking a step back doesn’t mean you have to be unemphathetic. While you can be emotionally there for your child, you simply don’t want them to be over reliant on their parents.
Encourage Your Kids to Work
Learning the value of hard work helps children build self-esteem and self-sufficiency. Once they realize that they have the power to make their own money through hard work, it can help them become more confident.
To help your child learn this lesson, you may want to encourage them to do work around the neighborhood. To help them get started, we’ve provided several kid-friendly business cards below. Have them distribute the cards to your friends, family or neighbors and they’ll be hard at work in no time.
[Printable Business Cards Download]
To help your child visualize their earnings, you might have them participate in the 52-week saving challenge below. Simply have them save and track a percentage of their earnings with the below printable.
Once your child is old enough to get their first real paycheck, you might even want to open a custodial IRA for kids. That way they can begin saving for their future today.
Closing Thoughts
While your child might be young now, one day they’ll be all grown up. To help them thrive when that time comes, it’s important to take steps to teach them responsibility today.