I know you put a helluva lot of pressure on yourself to raise responsible people with a strong work ethic.
You want your kids to push THEMSELVES to reach their highest potential academically and eventually in life.
Unfortunately, you aren’t always sure they are receiving the valuable lessons you take the time to impart on them.
Therefore, you never miss the opportunity to point out how important it is to strive for their personal best.
Unfortunately again, your carefully thought out speeches usually fall on deaf ears. Your kid shuts down just as you are really getting to the meat of the lesson.
You might feel like you are beating your head against the wall. Frustrating I know.
You know you only have a finite amount of time to instill these important skills and values.
You want everything for them. Every opportunity to live their best, happiest and fullest life.
They tell us to stop lecturing them.
We explain that we aren’t lecturing and simply pointing out how capable they truly are.
We tell them, “I’m your biggest cheerleader. I know you can do anything you set your mind to.”
They might think we are pointing out their inadequacies when all we are attempting to do is set them up for success.
Our real desire behind these lessons is that we believe success will bring feelings of confidence and pride.
We want them to achieve the positive feeling that comes from accomplishment.
Academic performance is quite often the area where we focus. We say, “School is your job.”
Here’s the rub…not only are these well intended life lessons almost never taken in, they can cause long term damage to our most important relationships.
Kids frequently perceive our well intended words to be a personal attack.
Our carefully chosen teachings could even leave them with a belief that we don’t think they are capable of figuring things out for themselves.
This will accomplish the exact opposite of what we intended.
The truth is that lasting self confidence and self worth don’t actually come from trophies, awards and resume’ builders.
You see, if we depend on external measures to feel good inside, we become beholden on something outside ourselves to feel good.
True confidence and happiness is an inside job.
Changing the conversation in our homes to help our kids show up as their best selves out in the world involves opportunities that extend beyond academic performance.
When our kids feel valuable as a contributing member at home and beyond, this is how they build confidence from the inside out.
Have you ever wondered how you could support your kids to earn that sense of accomplishment through work outside of school?
I wanna tell you about something super cool that will hopefully become available to teens and families across America.
Skratch is a revolutionary company that I’ve recently learned about. It’s an app that connects teenagers with work opportunities within their own communities. Quite often it becomes an opportunity for big kids to mentor little kids by sharing their unique skill set like math tutoring, piano or guitar lessons and babysitting.
It provides an opportunity for teens to learn lots of amazing life lessons through real life experiences while helping a parent out with affordable and convenient teen labor.
Learning through real life experience. Feeling a sense of accomplishment. Growing confidence and feeling valuable as a hard working human. Good stuff.
Skratch is up to great things. It is launching in Dallas and will hopefully be available in all of our communities soon.
Skratch invited me to be a speaker on a panel in Dallas this weekend.
ABOUT RANDI RUBENSTEIN
Randi helps parents, particularly ones with a strong willed kiddo, learn tools to raise confident, kind, and self motivated kids by improving the conversations in your family.
As the founder of Mastermind Parenting, host of the Mastermind Parenting podcast and author of The Parent Gap, Randi helps parents keep cool and replace old patterns. Randi’s parenting motto is, “When our thoughts grow, the convos in our home flow”.
To learn more go to www.randirubenstein.com.
