The Hardest Things You Are Going to Have to Teach Your Kids
Children are wonderful and bring a lot of love and joy into your life, but unfortunately, as they grow older, they learn some tough lessons about the world. To ensure they learn things in a healthy way, you will have to teach them about some tough topics. Here are a few of the hardest lessons and concepts you will need to teach your kids.
Failure
Children don’t like losing, which is why you often have to calm them down after they lose a game. Kids are unfamiliar with losing and failure and cannot understand it as adults can. Adults similarly have a tough time dealing with failure, but they can at least attach words to it and use those words to process how it makes them feel. To teach your children about failure, they will have to lose, which is tough to allow as a parent. However, if you can illustrate that failure does not mean the end of the world and that it can be an opportunity for your child to learn and grow as a person, they’ll be better prepared to handle it in the future.
Death
Failure is a difficult concept that you will need to teach your children, but it does not come close to rivaling death. Adults still struggle with death themselves as feelings of grief can often overwhelm someone, but ideally, they have some healthy coping mechanisms. On the other hand, children do not know how to grapple with the idea of death or emotions like grief. Therefore, you have to prepare them for the loss of a loved one and give them the space they need to ask questions and not feel judged. Likely, they will never fully understand it until they experience it, so having to teach them about it early can be incredibly challenging.
Bullying
Children are loving and have so much potential for good, but they can also be cruel, sometimes without even realizing it. You should teach your kids to be responsible and treat others with respect, but some might still be unable to see how their actions can hurt people.
Bullying is a major problem in our world, and your child can quickly become the victim or the bully. Teach them about bullying and how their actions have consequences. Teaching these lessons won’t be easy, but they are still important.
Identity
Along with bullying, you will need to teach your children about identity. Bullying can occur because of someone’s identity, and adults are not exempt from this bullying. Victims can come in all shapes and sizes, and so can the bully themselves.
To help teach your child about respect and bullying, you must also teach them about identity and how the world is full of different people and that those differences make it such a beautiful place to live.
These are some of the hardest things you are going to have to teach your kids. Even though it won’t be easy, you need to start talking about these ideas early so they can understand them and be prepared to enter the world as a stronger person.
Photo – Juan Pablo Serrano Arenas
