Usually, when you think of how you educate your kids, your first thoughts might be about how you can better help them learn reading, writing, maths, and the various different subjects we all dealt with at school. However, what if education is just as much about the values we teach them?
Conscientiousness, the awareness of the needs of others and desire to help them, isn’t something we’re all born with, it’s something we learn. As such, if you want your child to learn conscientiousness, you need to start teaching them. Here are a few ways to do that.
Make sure that they’re doing chores
An important part of conscientiousness is sacrifice. A lot of children grow up without learning any notion of sacrifice, not even when it comes to sacrificing a little of their time just to help someone out. As such, websites like https://www.home-ec101.com/clean-it/weekly-chore-schedule/ can help you put together a chores timetable that gets them in the habit of giving a little more of their time to help out. It can make them a lot more likely to volunteer time when needed.
Giving alongside them
When it comes to charitable donations and giving money to good causes, a kid’s ability to do that is limited by the fact that they don’t exactly have highly paid jobs. However, if you’re already paying them for doing chores, then you can set aside a little extra cash to teach them about giving as well. You can visit websites like https://uncommongiving.com/cause/family with them and tell them about the different causes. Each time they get pocket money, you can look at which causes you’re going to donate to.
Go volunteering with them
If chores are already a part of your child’s life, then you can make an effort to follow on from that lesson. Aside from learning to sacrifice a little of our time to help with the home, we can also give it to help with a range of causes. There are a lot of nonprofits that will welcome you and your children to help them, whether it’s in cleaning up the environment, sorting out donated goods, or otherwise, Sites like https://www.signupgenius.com/nonprofit/kid-friendly-volunteering.cfm can help you find them.
Talk to them about opportunities to be conscientious
The only way to really learn how to change our behavior for the better is to take a look at how we behave in our day to day lives. Talking to your child about their day at dinner, when you don’t have any distractions to worry about, can help you both go over the challenges and opportunities they have had throughout the day. You can take this opportunity to not criticize, but to ask them about how they might have dealt with situations in a more conscientious way.
You can’t force your child to develop good, conscientious habits. However, you can teach them and bring them with you, and you may find that they naturally adopt those same habits as they grow.