Parenting Tips on Educating Our Children to Map out their Life Journey



Posted: Wednesday, September 23, 2009

by Kim Siang Ng
TipsToEnrichYourLife

It is worth our while to choose and map out the life journey for our children. Generally, we can divide our life into three stages:

  1. Early Stage Before attaining the age of 20
  2. Middle Stage From age 20 to 60
  3. Late Stage Over age 60
We need to prepare our children when they are in the early stage so that they can lead a desired life when they go into the middle and late stages.

One school believes that children should be allowed to develop freely according to their likings. The children should not be restrained and should be allowed to enjoy their childhood and their youth. When these children go into the middle stage, they should be geared up for the battle fields in the business world so that they can compete and strive to achieve the financial goals. When these people enter the late stage, they are sent to retire in the old folks' homes. But many of these old people are not happy living in the homes. They lose their identity as they will be named by numbers. Everyday, they are watching their mates leaving this world and they are merely waiting for their turns to come. These old people are looking forward to live with their children and grandchildren so that they can enjoy the togetherness and the happiness of family life.

There is a Chinese saying, "All human beings have the same nature but our habits take us apart". That gives us the reasons to pay more attention to the physical and mental development of our children. We just cannot allow our children to do as they like because undesirable behaviors, when not monitored, will soon become habits. It will be more difficult and time consuming to change a habit.

For example, it is easier for a person who is thrifty to become a spend-thrift; but it is extremely difficult for a spend-thrift to become a thrifty person. When our children are still small, we need to inculcate in him the virtues of being thrifty. Nowadays, many parents allowed their children to have anything under the sun on the pretext of love. As long as their children requested, they are sure to have what they want. It is not surprising to see youngsters nowadays carrying a number of credit cards, swiping each in turn, until it reaches its credit limit. These youngsters will eventually end up with huge credit card debts not withstanding the fact that they are not even able to earn a decent income yet.

As we are living in a highly materialistic world, the external temptation is too much for our children to refuse. Just take the example of cell phone and just look around to see who are the ones carrying the latest model in the market. We need to teach our children to be grateful for whatever they already had and not to go after the materialistic possession blindly.

Many youngsters are also known to spend all their monthly salary in the first half of the month and have to be financed by their parents to get by. The parents may advise their children to budget their spending but continue to give them the money whenever they were approached. The parents' action is not helping their children in anyway to fix their behavior.

To ensure that our children can lead a meaningful life in this world, we as parents need to teach them to be grateful and to encourage them to have good behaviors.

This Article has been viewed 217 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.