Goal Setting: Creating Goals With Your Children

One of the most important aspects of life that you can teach your children is planning. Setting goals, working towards milestones, and rejoicing when things are accomplished is a great thing. Many parents struggle with the chaos of so much going on, but there are things that can be done to ensure that children can learn this valuable part of life. The following guide can help with setting up a simple plan towards goal setting in a monthly arena.

Choose A Calendar

The first thing that you should do with your children is simple, get a calendar. Focus on a wall calendar that they like, and let them pick it out. This is going to be the foundation of planning, as  it will allow them to write in the dates, and schedule things that should get worked on. This allows them to have a little more control over their projects and planning overall, so let them choose just about anything here.

Write Small Milestones

After you have the calendar up on the wall, write in some small milestones that lead to a larger project. For instance, let’s say that you wanted to have a month-long project of cleaning up the house. On each week write down 1 task per day, and that’s it. By the last day of the month, 30 or 31 projects will be done, making the larger goal completely done. The same can be done to break up month long chores, school work and more. When a small element is done, put a red line through it to make sure that it’s done, and the visual is in place.

Fill Up The Calendar

The options mentioned above can’t work unless you follow up on the process. Setting weekly milestones with 7 steps forward is a good way to start. But over time, you’ll want to fill up the calendar with more and more tasks. By doing this, and crossing out the things that are done, you’ll show children how to set up a goal, follow through on steps to complete it, and finally cross it off a list. This is the most basic way to teach planning, and follow through.

If you’re not an organized person, or you have trouble setting goals and accomplishing various tasks, don’t worry. You can join your child in setting up a calendar, and crossing things out as you accomplish them. You can even rejoice together when you both have done everything on the list!

Wishing you an amazing year!

Is Your Child Too Busy? The Pitfalls of a Constantly Busy Child

Parents today are stretched very thin at times. With work, social demands, and so much more pulling at the strings of parents, it may be a good idea to keep a child busy. But that poses problems as well. Children that are too “busy”, could very well lose a part of childhood that lets them build self-esteem, self-reliance, and even confidence. There are some pitfalls to doing too much as a child, and many parents are finding out the hard way. Instead of going overboard, consider a few notes on why you should balance a child’s activities to allow them some down time from the grind of everyday life.

Play Time Is Diminished

One of the biggest hurdles of the ever-busy child is that they don’t have play time. You may not think that this could be productive, but it’s very important for a young person. As a child grows up, they use this time to use their imagination and creativity. They do this to ensure that they are dealing with a variety of positive elements overall. They create environments and structures that help their brains develop. Even if you think it’s a waste of time, to them, it’s a grand element that is full of wonder. Encouraging children to imagine, and be creative in play time is a great way to build personality constructs and more.

Friendship and Social Time Suffers

Friendships take time to build. Creating long lasting friendships is a great thing for a child. However, if they are constantly busy, moving in and out of classes, going to extract curricular activities, and never allowed to have down time to play with others, they may have a void in communication. You want to allow your child to flourish socially, and that is done by letting them have some time away from the serious nature of some of the activities they may be involved with. Building relationships that last start at youth and develop in time.

Growing Up Resentful

Adults that have busy childhoods, often end up resenting their upbringing. They cite things like, not being able to be a kid, or not being allowed to have a bit of fun. These things way heavy on the minds of millions of people, and through therapy they can be helped. Professionals, however, agree that when raising children, they should be left to have some fun, downtime, and use their imagination to create lavish worlds and more. Suffice to say, kids should have time to be “kids” sometimes.

How To Be A Role Model of Self Determination

One of the best things that you can do as a parent is simple, become a role model. BY living your life in a positive manner, you can enrich the life of your children for the rest of their lives. Instead of focusing on the old adage of, “do as I say, not as I do”, you can show them how to live fruitful, powerful lives by the way that you choose to live yours. Kids will emulate their parents, especially the bad habits that may not be empowering for them. With that in mind, consider the following steps to help become a role model with focus on self determination today.

Get Things Done – Time Management

The first way to start on this quest is to get things done from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep. Show children how to manage their time. That includes not hitting the snooze button, but instead getting up at the alarm, and fighting through fatigue. Show them that you may not like waking up early and getting your day started, but you fight through it. Don’t become lax here, fight through it knowing that they are going to emulate you. Set up a to-do list and slowly cross things out as you go through and show children that they can do the same. At the end of the day, compare lists, and you’ll be able to show that you go through ups and downs, but you keep pressing forward.

Never Stop Learning – Take A Class

Show children that adulthood doesn’t mean that you don’t learn new things. Take a class, experience something new, and showcase a bit of struggle. Let them know that it’s ok to do hard things, and progress slowly. When stumped, consider taking up something that involves visual progression. For instance, take an art class, or learn how to play an instrument. Show that you are capable to struggle and success through the learning process and they will have an illustrated way of knowing that they are not alone in their own struggles with learning at school, and in other areas.

Eat Right and Exercise

The last way to become a role model of self determination is to keep healthy. This is a real life struggle for a grand majority of people. Make sure that you highlight the importance of this simple daily task. By working on the discipline that it takes to work out, eat right, and maintain weight, you are going to exemplify healthy living. It is important to highlight good habits, and this is one that may seem easy on paper, but many parents struggle with. Managing time, pursuing good health, and succeeding in this will definitely prove beneficial in both the short, and long term.

These are just starting points in regards to becoming a better role model. It’s easy to rest on laurels, go through motions, and try to just coast. Shake things up and find new ways to change yourself, your routine, because children are no doubt watching and shaping their lives alongside yours.

Have Brainstorming Sessions With Your Children

Spark Creative Entrepreneurial Thought Processes In Children With Brain Storming

One of the easiest ways to get your child involved in entrepreneurship, or at least thinking like an entrepreneur is through brainstorming. Millions of business owners do this on a regular basis. They focus on finding new routes to work through money making elements, hiring the right people, building portfolios, and doing a lot of work that is needed on a daily basis. In practice, this can help with project planning, management, and more. Bringing it down to a simpler scale is not complex. It’s a matter of taking the things that a child does and then compartmentalizing them for efficiency.

The Chore Element

As mentioned in the previous post, chores are a great tool to tie to entrepreneurship for your child. You can also very easily spark creativity through chores. When looking at chores that need to get done, you could take out a piece of paper, or use a whiteboard to brain storm how to get things down faster and easier. Sometimes the best thing to do is engage with a child’s visual learning curve. Visual learning uses drawings, more than just text. It’s easy to write a lot of text lists, but children may not find them amusing or fun. That’s where you may want to consider drawing, even simple sketches as you creatively tackle chore ideas and more.

Letting Children’s Imagination Run Wild

Sometimes the notion of business and entrepreneurial lessons can seem drab. That’s why it’s important to focus on sparking creativity. You can easily do this by bringing down hard concepts to the level of a child. Let them engage with some of the ideas, and write down simple things that they would do. Sometimes a session of brainstorming is a matter of writing down as many ideas as possible, in a short span of time. Once they are written, take a step back and see what works, what doesn’t, and why some things are better than others overall. Simply put, let a child’s imagination run wild.

Bring Them Into Your Business

When in doubt, focus on allowing your child to see what your brain storming sessions are like. Chances are you have a lot of elements balanced out, and need help pushing them through. How do you do it? Explain the bigger picture concepts that you deal with, and show children how they too can pursue the same thing. The learning options within the notion of entrepreneurship are endless. It’s just a matter of painting them in language that children understand, and want to explore. With that, you can spark creativity, and an industrious mind all the same.

Begin Teaching Your Child Entrepreneurship with Chores

Engaging the notions and ideas of entrepreneurship at a young age is a great thing. When you can get a child to become interested in business opportunities, and the possibilities that are out there, they learn skills that last a lifetime. Starting in business doesn’t have to be relegated to age, or status. Children can learn concepts fast, and use them to run real life businesses. There’s plenty of stories of young entrepreneurs that have gone out to make serious moves financially, all before they turn 18. Some even starting as young as 8 or 9 years old. Not everyone is going to want to start a full business venture, but there are things that can be done to get started. For instance, chores can help teach fundamentals in many ways. 

Linking Allowances As Part of An Education in Entrepreneurship 

The first major point of interest for teaching children about business is found in chores. Chores can be leveraged to show cause and effect. You can do one of two things. You can give a child an allowance for the chores that they do per week. This shows them that if they work hard, they will get paid a fair wage. It’s a simple process, and it stays with them for a lifetime

The second solution is found with investing. If one does their chores, they can earn a little money through an allowance. The progression there is to invest that money into a business opportunity. Whether it’s supplies for making lemonade, or it’s to buy raw materials for crafting, the allowance earned from chores can be used as startup capital for business options. 

Creating Opportunities

There’s plenty of projects a child can work through, including some that allow them to earn through chores and learn about entrepreneurial endeavors. Working with them to find projects that they can build on their own, or focus on after the fact is the key element. Whether you want them to work through a lot of chores weekly, or a few things here and there, you can show a child the complex nature of what small business owners go through when starting up an endeavor. 

To start on this path, set up simple chores first. A few chores for a small allowance on a weekly basis is enough to get started with learning about entrepreneurial roles, and more. Then progress slowly to larger sums, more work, and teach supply and demand. There’s many learning opportunities found with chores, and it all starts with simple weekly tasks.