6 Life Lessons for Young Kids
I’ve idly wondered from time to time how much damage I may have done when I consider some of the life lessons I’ve taught my kids over the years. I don’t know if I make more mistakes than most parents or if I’m just dumb enough to own them out loud. Let’s take a brief trip through time and visit some of the ones I think are important in the rearing of a child that I may have inadvertently screwed up. I’ll start with an important one — integrity.
Life Lesson #1 — Integrity
Having integrity means keeping your word and doing what you say you’re going to do. Over the years I’ve made threats of such magnitude you might think I was a bad mom. The reality is I have gallows humor.
Frequently, when my kids would irritate me it would lead me to say something I had no intention of following through on or was a flat-out lie. For example, if they didn’t clean their room I’d threaten to take every toy they own and give it to GoodWill. If they mouthed off at me my all-time favorite lie was, “I’m gonna snap off your arm and beat you with the soggy end.”
I will say that I was consistent in my inability to maintain integrity by not following through with my threats. Of course, since they knew this, the little squirts always ended up laughing at me. This leads me to a life lesson on humor.
Life Lesson #2 — Humor
I swear to God I’m not racist… at least not intentionally. When my kids were little we had this Cantonese restaurant we would order from but rarely ate at. I thought it was funny to pretend to order using an accent. I fancied myself really talented at doing voices. (Ask me to imitate farm animals sometime… I’m amazing.)
So imagine my horror when we decided to eat in the establishment rather than just pick it up to go and both my kids decided to order “beef and brockery” and “flied lice” from our waitress. I was beyond mortified. My now ex-husband laughed at me, thus teaching our kids yet another form of humor — laughing at someone else’s expense. (You can probably intuit one of the big reasons he is now “Mr. Ex” and paying dearly for the pleasure — which leads me to the next life lesson — finance.)
Life Lesson #3 — Finance
My son learned at the tender age of 5 that if he wanted anything he had to get a job. If he asked me, I’d start singing the song “Job” by the Silhouettes. One day he was standing in front of the TV watching a commercial for a toy called Bionicle. He got super excited and said, “I want a Bionicle!” and immediately turned to me before I could say a word and said, “I know, I know… get a job, sha na na na.”
Geez… I would have gotten it for Christmas. I’m not a total asshole — which leads to life lesson #4 — Being Kind to Others.
Life Lesson #4 — Being Kind to Others
My daughter Cat is 19 months younger than her brother Maxx and much smaller. Despite this disadvantage, she found out at an early age that she could pick on him because he would not fight back. He was always coming to me crying that she had hit him again or stolen something.
One day I was in the backyard gardening and he came running up to me crying. When I asked what happened he blubbered out that Cat had hit him again. My response was not one of my finer moments. In a fit of utter frustration, I looked at him and said, “Goddamn it Maxx, the next time she hits you, hit her back!”
Yeah… brilliant parenting right? Two minutes later Cat comes swaggering around the corner. Maxx hauled off and cold-cocked her! After quickly ascertaining she was not in need of an ambulance I lost it laughing. I looked at Maxx and snorted out between laughs, “I said NEXT time she hits you, not next time you see her!” This of course leads directly to a life lesson about delaying gratification.
Life Lesson #5 — Delayed Gratification
I had seen this video about an experiment in the 60s that used marshmallows to test the correlation between children’s ability to delay gratification and their future rate of success. I thought it would be an illuminating teaching moment for my two angels, then aged 4 & 5.
I sat them down at the kitchen table with an egg timer and a small stack of cookies. I put one cookie in front of each child and told them if they could wait 1 minute and not eat the cookie, I would give them 2 cookies.
I set the egg timer for 1 minute. Maxx carefully pushed his cookie away from the edge of the table, folded his hands in front of him, and waited patiently as the timer ticked down. Cat grabbed her cookie and gobbled it as fast as she could. When the timer dinged I didn’t say anything, I simply placed a second cookie on top of Maxx’s first one.
Maxx proceeded to eat his 2 cookies while Cat slammed her head on the table and threw a tantrum. To this day, my daughter has struggled with delaying gratification. Her learning it would be sweet music to my ears… which leads me to the final life lesson tonight.
Life Lesson #6 — Music
Music, in my world, is integral to a child’s upbringing. It’s played daily in my home. I raised my kids to appreciate a wide variety. I played everything from classical and jazz to R&B, pop, rock, and rap. It’s that last category where I fell down in my parenting again. It never really occurred to me that my kids were not only listening to my music but memorizing it. Nor did it occur to me to censor what I was playing.
I was driving them both to school one morning when I heard this adorable, piping voice rapping a line from an Usher song called, “Yeah”. Maxx’s cute little voice belted out the rap line, “We want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed!” as his not-so-innocent 4-year-old sister avidly listened.
After I finished laughing my ass off I had to figure out how to impress upon him that he can NOT sing this for his teachers or his classmates. What the hell can you tell a 5-year-old that will make sense?! I decided upon that classic parenting trick — “Just do as I say and not as I do!” With my never ending foibles in parenting, I utilized this adage on a regular basis.
There are countless life lessons that I’ve imparted to my kids over the years. Some of them I did well on and, as you heard here, some not so well. I’ve tried to teach them that, yeah, they, along with the rest of the world, have some character flaws but that doesn’t mean anything other than to keep an eye peeled for when they pop up and interfere with life. I hope they remember that the best medicine for these times is laughter. There’s nothing like a good belly laugh at yourself to take the sting out of life’s lessons.
