What Your Children Reflect of You
Looking at your children can bring great joy to your life. You raise your kids in your own image hoping they will reflect well on you. But kids are individuals and develop their own personalities. It is unhealthy to expect your kids to mirror you in every way or focus on how society looks at you because of their lives. But there are several ways your children can show a reflection of you. Here are three attitudes and behaviors your children probably learned from you.
-
Naughty and Nice
Kindness and rudeness are commonly passed down from generation to generation. Struggling to be kind to your family and friends is typically only an issue in dysfunctional families. But feeling entitled to treat strangers, employees and people who serve you poorly is unfortunately a behavior displayed by many parents and picked up by many kids.
Some children can recognize how this makes the recipients of verbal and mental abuse, shaming, teasing, bullying and threats feel, and inspires them to act differently. Some kids are also naturally compassionate and realize they would feel horrible being treated this way, and so choose not to treat others badly. But don’t count on your kids reversing your nasty attitude. If you see your child being rude, entitled and bullying, make sure it’s not you that is influencing them.
-
Open and Closed Arms
Compassion is contagious, but so is judgment. Empathy is a skill most people need to be taught. Children first learn it from their home life, then have it reinforced or challenged by their social interactions. You can lay a strong foundation of compassion, empathy and understanding for your child, so if they come up against a harsh and unfeeling world they retain their incentive to remain caring and warm. If you find your child hardening and taking advantage of people, putting others down, or refusing to answer the call for assistance, their foundation may not be strong enough to withstand the pressure to only look out for themselves. Or you may have shown them that the world doesn’t care about them so they shouldn’t care about the world.
-
Open and Closed Minds
Openness to new ideas or experiences is often associated with better life satisfaction, better social interactions and ease of accepting change in life. Being closed-minded and uncomfortable with change can not only have negative consequences in life but tends to increase over time. Meaning your closed-minded kid will likely become an even more closed-minded adult. So by the time you have children, if you are closed-minded you are probably far into this exclusionary mentality and setting up your child to feel the same.
Being open to experiences allows people to have more diverse experiences, meet more diverse people and encounter more diverse schools of thought. Having rigid and dogmatic ideas and beliefs can exclude your child from having access to new opportunities and achieving the personal success they desire. Good people come from all walks of life and isolating yourself to a small group will leave you with a very small circle of support.
Children are sponges and absorb what they experience. As they grow and learn, kids will do what they see, not what they’re told to do. And bad habits are easier to pass down than good ones. So make sure you are modeling the behavior you want to see in your kids. And if you realize your children are developing problematic personalities: First, step in and adjust their attitude. Then, step back and correct your own.
