Encouraging our children

Encouragement

It can be tiresome listening to children telling you about things that are so often nonsense, petty or plain dull. It might be banal and boring, but the more active face to face communication they get the greater their language skills develop. The love of being listened to carefully and with genuine interest is felt by all of us. We all appreciate being heard whatever age we are.

A child held up an artwork to show their parents and the parents said, “well done”. Being somewhat suspicious the child kept showing ever worse pictures each day after school. Each time they got, “that is good, well done”. The child must have felt ignored. The parents weren’t taking a blind bit of notice.

Do we need to be frightened of telling some home truths? You can show respect for their effort and show that you understand that they tried hard. However, fake false praise just delays the pain. Jeremy was drawn by an artist that was told their works was childish when at high school. Drawings of a three-year-old at fourteen. Would it still be shite if they were over praised back then? Who knows? You search (for ages sometimes) to point out what is not too bad in their work. Then give a deserved “well done” for each bit of improvement.

Hard as it sounds, we can stop and think about how we would approach things if we knew our child was not going to reach adulthood. Hopefully, your child and all others will reach a ripe old age, but sadly that is far from guaranteed. This can lead to a thinking where we do not over invest, over stress and over pressure our children simply for a bright future in the workplace. We find a balance. A fun childhood with time to play and indulge in frivolity whist still putting in a reasonable amount of study.

An easy ride does not bring about any sense of reward. You do not get a great deal of enjoyment from things that you haven’t worked hard for. Which child will look after what they are given? Which child will appreciate what they have? Will it be one that has been given too much, too easily or one that has worked hard and earned it? A child who saves up for weeks on end for something will enjoy the result much more. They will continue with the notion of save and spend into adulthood.

The trap, the rut. You have worked hard, passed all your exams. You enter the workforce and have an income now. Time to be rewarded. It is so compelling to get things on credit. You can afford the repayments. However, as each new commitment takes a bite out of your wage packet you have less and less freedom. I owe, I owe, so off to work I go. Even if you never exercise the option of being able to take a month out, take a break away, move completely, change track, it is the psychological uplift, the sense that you can, if you wanted to at some point that is magnificent.

A steady reliable stream of income is desirable for companies and governments. They want you to work and they are adept at making you feel guilty if you are not at the coalface. Buy now, pay later is one more way of taking away any feeling of liberation. Regular tax receipts, predictable payments enable them to plan. You are after all a pawn in their grand game. You are conned into believing that it is what you are supposed to do. Work is rewarding, a necessity for our soul, but are we working to tread water or swim where we want?

Each year a certain day is marked out where we feel obliged to buy our children something big and special. The child is past the stage where they play more with the box than the expensive item itself. We might try and persuade a child to value your time more than offerings, but they are not so easy to fob off anymore. Buying them something smaller to avoid going into debt is a far better medium-term solution, but we know that they don’t understand that. They see all the other kids in the street getting plenty, so why not them too. We resort to a loan of some sort, paying heaps of interest and have less to spend on them later in the year for sure.

If you want to be cruel to be kind, make your children suffer the pain of waiting. Open an account at your local savings office. Place a small amount of money in it. Allow the child to place the account access document deep inside their toybox, out of your reach. As each week passes you give them some pocket money or chore redemption cash and they can build a small pot to buy something of significance. Do this in place of going into debt to get them something ‘they can’t live without’. Yes, it will be a disappointment at first, but at least they will see the amount in the account building. It provides something guaranteed. Some promise they will get them what they want next month, but something crops up and it never materialises. If they have the money growing in the account, it is so much more honest.