One of the perks of being an adult is being in full control of all the decisions you make, so in the case that what’s best for you can be put off for later you can indeed take the decision to get to it later. As long as you acknowledge the fact that the responsibility ultimately lies with you and that you essentially shape the consequences you’ll have to deal with, it’s all alright.
That’s perhaps as far as it goes by way of the perks of being an adult though because as you’ll know, it’s generally just one mighty challenge which you can’t even take a break from if you want to or in fact if you feel that you need to. Add kids to the equation and what was already the colossal responsibility of keeping yourself alive and sane is multiplied tenfold!
One of the most important lessons which it’s your responsibility to teach your children however is that of how to combat laziness, because it is indeed laziness which could ultimately make for the biggest hindrance in the positive progression of their lives and in the quality of the life they’ll eventually be stuck with once you’re no longer around to help them and ease the burden.
It starts with the domestic environment – they need to know that their effort is directly proportional to the quality of their lives and while this may not be universally true, the dynamics which include you being able to read this blog post right now suggest that it is indeed true for you and your kids. It’s another discussion altogether when we take into account just how hard people living in some of the most rural parts of Africa work disproportionately to what they get in return…
So to combat laziness in your kids, you have to lead by example first. While it’s a good starting point to literally communicate to them why you do the things you do, e.g. “I go to work every morning so that we can have money to ‘live’,” they’ll need a bit more of an interactive way to get involved. You’ll have to strike right at their subconscious minds and in a sense train them to associate basic necessities with some kind of reward for some kind of effort having been invested.
It’ll most definitely have to be basic necessities of which their absence they can literally feel the discomfort, but sometimes even that’s not enough because instinct tells them that you’re there for them as the parent to provide. So the next best thing in conjunction with the targeting of the basic necessities would be targeting their comforts and luxuries. You can get as elaborate about it as you want, but keeping it simple would perhaps take the form of something like not buying them the new Xbox game they want if their grades at school aren’t at a level acceptable to you.
Naturally it would have been a priorly discussed target which would be a fair one given their abilities.
