Helping Your Child Learn Responsible Behavior - continued

A Job Well Done

We need to show our children that we take satisfaction in acting properly and accomplishing difficult tasks.

What to do

1. Through your daily activities, show your children that you care about a job well done.
2. Perhaps our children's most important tasks are to work hard at school and do homework. When we check homework and point out mistakes, we help them see how an error has arisen. When we let them correct errors themselves, we inspire self-confidence. It is also important for us to show them that we appreciate their good efforts.
3. Teaching our children self-respect does not mean complimenting everything they do. Our children also need our honest criticism from time to time. When we do criticize, it should be of things they have done, not them personally.
4. Most of all, we should help our children form the self-confidence and self-respect that come from opportunities to do good work as students or as family members.

Helping our children form self-respect is based on how we treat them and our own example. There are many opportunities to teach self-respect through our actions:

Dad, nobody's going to see inside the model's wing. Why do you work so hard with all those little pieces? Because that's the right way to build the plane, Martha. It makes the wing strong when the plane flies, and that's more important than what people see. I want to make the best plane I can. Do you want to help?