Generations | Building Self Awareness & Good Experiences

Tips to build your kids self awareness. Tips to build your kids self esteem. Kids are people, too. Building their awareness and self esteem will make a difference in their life, for life.  What an experience!  What a feeling!

We'd all be smart to ask for tips from each other's experiences, right? Well, Tip #1: Do not assume absolutes ... everything changes and we all get to learn from our own experiences. Allow for differing perspectives and situations, live flexibility, make suggestions, spell out possible consequences, but remember they're only possibilities.  They are not absolutes. Let kids (and all people) in your life learn and be responsible for their own decisions and actions. That includes you. Kids cannot learn if you don't let them experience all the good and all the bad that they generate for themselves. Protect them from harm, but don't protect them from experience.

Tip #2: It is a disfavor to tell another person how they should feel. Feelings are a unique, personal, and individual experience. Telling kids "you should be happy" does nothing but confuse them, and eventually it builds frustration and resentment. How are kids ever going to know how they truly feel about anything if they've always been told they should be happy, when they're actually sad, angry, or frustrated? How are kids (or anyone for that matter) supposed to build their self awareness and self esteem, and learn to deal with their feelings when they are not even allowed to experience and identify them honestly and fully?

Tip #3: A little more on feelings: If you think about it, how are any of us to know what someone else is feeling? I'm not you. You are not me. We have never felt any but our own feelings and experiences. Maybe we should allow the sadness without pushing the guilt; the unhappiness without pointing out fault; the excitement without the caution about getting let down. Allow the feelings, allow the awareness of self. Allow kids the personal experience of success or failure for their choices. Provide explanation after, if it's even necessary. We all need to better ackowledge our own true feelings, so we can learn how to navigate our own self awareness through the rest of our own lives.

Interesting thought and Tip #4: Have you ever noticed? Humans are the only animals on earth who tell their young it's not okay to stop or quit something that makes them miserable. Why is that? Why did "quit" become such a bad word? As adults, you may have noticed that many people cannot recognize what is making them miserable, let alone what makes them happy. Perhaps that is because they were never allowed to trust and feel their own feelings, and create their own positive experiences because they were afraid to quit.

Now consider: If we don't allow our youth to make their own choices and feel the weight of their own responsibilty, how will they ever find what makes them happy? How will they ever learn or experience self awareness and build self esteem?

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