Teaching Patience…
Patience is a virtue, right? Of course, it is.
Patience is a virtue, right? Of course, it is. As you navigate the world in your daily life how much patience do you see demonstrated? Whether it is a trip to the grocery store or a quick run to your favorite coffee shop, you will eventually run into individuals displaying a severe shortage of patience. Quiet as it is kept, that person maybe you. So, knowing that we live in a society full of people who have little to no patience, how do you raise a child who is patient? What skills do you need to teach them? Here are a few ideas as you work to cultivate a child who demonstrates patience in their daily lives.
Use examples from your daily life to teach your child either what to do or what not to do.
We all have times when we are a little less patient. Depending on what is happening in our lives or even just during a normal day our patience may be thin. There are other times that you will be proud of yourself for demonstrating patience in a tough situation. Use those examples to teach your child what patience looks like. Often times our kids want to know how we navigate life; they want to know when we make mistakes and how we fix them. This helps us to be relatable to them.
Help your child understand delayed gratification.
This is one that I am currently working on with my child. She is a pre-teen and she has a hard time with this concept. She wants everything right away when she sees it. I know that this is a struggle for most children in this society. We are in a time when children are used to instant gratification and having what they want as soon as they desire it. What I do with my daughter is remind her of her future goals when she desires something in the moment. Having her make the decision to determine whether she wants to have her current wish or one in the future helps her to prioritize her wants. It also helps her to realize that she will not be able to have it all, all of the time, so she needs to learn to wait on some of the things that she wants. This is a great lesson in demonstrating patience.
Set goals with your child.
This goes hand in hand with delayed gratification. Sitting down with your child to help them set goals is a very helpful skill. This helps your child determine the steps that they need to take in order to get to an end result. This is also a lesson in patience because they will see that there is a process that they need to follow in order to achieve their final goal. When this is a new skill for your child, you may want to set up dates to check in with them to see the kind of progress that the are making. This way you will be able to see if you need to step in to offer support.
Teaching our children patience is truly a life skill. They will not live in a world where everything will be readily available to them. So they will need to know how to handle situations that require patience. This will help them as they learn to relate to and work with a variety of people, it will also help them in their relationships moving forward. A consistently impatient person is one that most people avoid and try not to interact with. Most children don’t want this for their future so it is up to use to teach them.