As a parent, your goals are to give your children every advantage in life by teaching them responsibility, providing opportunities for creativity, sharing life skills such as cooking, and setting them up financially as much as you can when they leave the nest.
We’ll discuss fantastic methods parents can use to help them accomplish these goals, from the advantages of having a family garden to looking into insurance products such as the Gerber Life College Plan.
Ways to Teach Responsibility
Children don’t come with a guidebook. Each child is different, so parenting is not a one-size-fits-all. Teaching responsibility can come in various forms, and those responsibilities can and will change as your child gets older. Teaching your children duties at a young age will make things easier the older they become.
Children as young as 2 can understand that actions have consequences, so even young children can learn how to become responsible individuals. For example, if your 12-year-old leaves their homework at home, don’t rush it to their school.
Suppose your child was hurting another person’s feelings or acting in a hurtful way. You can show them how to apologize. This will teach your children how to be responsible for their actions and how our actions can come at a price, not just for ourselves but for others as well.
Learning From Everyday Tasks
People learn best from watching others, so let your children watch you do everyday tasks such as paying bills, exercising, cleaning the house, and performing other chores. If your children have questions about doing something, don’t be afraid to show them as they will begin to replicate your actions.
Teach your children the responsibility of investing, both with money and their time. Joining sports or extracurricular activities is an excellent way of showing kids different ways to be responsible. If your child wants to quit halfway through the season, have them stick it out. It shows your child how to work for the goals they set and build character.
Give your children age-appropriate chores and praise them for their successes. An allowance for older children and chore charts with stickers where each action goes toward a prize for younger children are both excellent ways to show how your hard work can pay off.
Fostering Creativity
With schools spending more time focusing on teaching to the test and pushing S.T.E.M. learning on your children, teaching kids to be creative at home has become more critical than ever before.
Teaching your children to be creative learners, thinkers, and doers can happen in many different ways. Try encouraging your young children to join a music program with you, or plan some science experiments at home with your children. Not only will it allow for creativity to blossom, but it will also be a memorable experience for you both.
Some public libraries offer “Baby and me” music classes for as young as 6 weeks old. Activities such as finger painting, building castles with kinetic sand, and sorting colored objections will encourage children to express themselves creatively and often, as these activities can be pretty fun.
Asking Questions
Lastly, when it comes to fostering a creative learning environment for your children, encourage them to ask questions. Asking questions is a normal part of the learning process, and children should become comfortable doing so.
As a parent, encouraging questions and pushing your children to learn problem-solving skills are necessary. Children will come up with wrong answers at some point, and they should know that being wrong is okay as long as they don’t give up.
Not everything goes your way. Learning how to cope and pursue the desired result are skills your children can take with them into adulthood.
Learning to Cook
If your goal is to send your children into the adult world as independent, successful humans, cooking meals is a talent you should pass on to them.
Teaching your children to cook will benefit them in many ways. Cooking leads to learning about nutrition and making a healthy choice. It makes your children realize that their decisions matter and can change their life. Small decisions like eating veggies over choosing a cupcake every day can make a big difference.
You can begin teaching your children how to cook between the ages of 6 and 8 years old. Learning how to cook allows your children to use, practice, and master the skills they learn at school and at home. Measuring, counting, following a sequence of events, and trial and error are all skills they will use while cooking.
Don’t be afraid to have your children learn how to use the stove. With adult supervision, they should know the basics of using a stove at around 8 years old. If you want to incorporate some physical activity into your home, try adding a family garden. Gardens will provide you with homegrown fruits and vegetables, but they offer much more.
Maintaining a garden takes a lot of effort, and it teaches responsibility. Having a garden can often lead you to make healthy choices when thinking about side dishes, as the veggies you have at hand are easily accessible. It gets your family outdoors and shows them the importance fitness plays in their life while enjoying the weather and working on a project together.
College Savings
Great parents strive every day to provide their children with experiences and opportunities they didn’t have growing up. What’s better than a college fund that also doubles as a life insurance policy? The Gerber Life College Plan is exactly what it sounds like.
This plan provides an opportunity to save money toward your child’s college education while also having a life insurance policy that pays them if anything happens to you.
When your child is an infant, you have no idea what type of person they will become or what aspirations they may have. A benefit to the Gerber plan is that it doesn’t require someone to go to college. The policy will pay out on either its maturity date or the policyholder’s death date.
This type of plan isn’t treated as a college plan, even though it’s advertised as one. It’s not tax-deductible, and the payout will be taxed when you receive it.
The Gerber College Plan is simple; it provides a low risk and is cost-effective because you can decide on the premium amount you want to pay each month. That premium never changes. You can get up to a 250K life insurance policy with the Gerber College Plan.
Teaching your children to cook your family’s favorite recipe, pushing them to pursue playing a musical instrument, or providing them with a monetary gift of a college fund are all significant steps towards the right path to raising your children to be successful, happy, and independent people.
