The Traits Your Kids Will Remember You For

We spend a lot of years in the classroom…more than we realize. Certainly, we spend the years it takes to finish high school…and college…and graduate school. That’s a lot of hours spent with teachers. Many different subjects taught. Many different skills learned. When you consider it, the teachers that you have over your lifetime exert a lot of influence on you. And not just in teaching the content that the course demands.

Who they are influences you, too. Because, like it or not, your teachers also are role models for you. They influence your ideas of right and wrong, important and unimportant, etc. They have helped shape you into the person you are today.

This thought hits home when you think about your kids’ teachers. When you send your children off to school each morning, they are learning even more than you realize. Sure, they’re learning about math, science, and history. But they are also learning about how to interact with other people. They’re learning what kind of people they want to be. They’re learning how to view the world and what to think about the world. They’re learning about their place in the world. And for about 7 hours a day, they are learning it from their teachers.

For many, this is a comforting thought. For many, the schools that their children attend are staffed by excellent roles models…teachers whose world view, whose morals, whose character traits are exactly what you would hope for in the people who spend so much quality time with their kids. But for other parents, this thought is troubling. They don’t know their kids’ teachers and what they do know doesn’t give them much confidence. And so they pray.

I’d like you to consider, though, who children’s most important teachers are: their parents. It’s you. You are their first teachers. You will be the teachers that they spend more time with than anyone else. And you will be their most influential teachers. Because they are always learning from you. They see what is important to you…what you value and emphasize…and it becomes important to them. They see how you spend your time and it becomes how they spend their time. They see your character traits and they emulate them. They look up to you and they want to be like you.

Who you are is often more important than what you do. Let me say that again: who you are is more important than what you do.  More important than any parenting technique for motivating or disciplining your children. More than any activity or enrichment opportunity that you offer your children. Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott (www.RealRelationships.com) make this point very clearly in their book, The Parent You Want To Be.  This is because who you are, even more than what you do, helps to shape your kids into the people that they will become.

The Parrotts draw out 10 character traits that they find most important in parents. They are:

1. Being an affirming parent.
2. Being a patient parent.
3. Being an attentive parent.
4. Being a visionary parent.
5. Being a connected parent.
6. Being a celebratory parent.
7. Being an authentic parent.
8. Being a comforting parent.
9. Being an insightful parent.
10. Being a prayerful parent.

Some of these traits are fairly self-explanatory. But some aren’t. Next time, I’ll spend some time explaining each of these traits. Until then, spend some time thinking…what am I most thankful that my parents modeled for me?