Teaching the kids who's the bosss of whom!

"You're not the boss of me!"

Turns out we are in charge of ourselves.  And that's a pretty tricky thing for a parent.  You are responsible for your kids, and you want to teach them obedience and respect for you as their parent, but you also want them to take ownership of their actions and feelings and initiative for the things in their life that they can handle.

Starting in earnest our family's journey into living the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families as created by Stephen Covey, we had a family home evening lesson last Monday night on the first Habit.  For more info on what the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families are, you can check my other posts on the subject and/or listen to this short summary.

 

Habit 1: Be Proactive

After a song and a prayer, we read the story called "Bored!  Bored!  Bored!" from the awesome book on the 7 habits written specifically for kids by Stephen Covey's son, Sean.  In it, Sammy Squirrel discovers that he can't blame his friends and family for his boredom, but he can make his own fun.  The book even helps you springboard into a broader and deeper discussion of what it means to be proactive, or in the book's kid friendly lingo, "You are in charge of yourself."  The kids colored free downloadable coloring pages of Sammy the Squirrel as I read and we talked.


Because we are religious, we didn't want to take all our source material for this lesson from secular places.  We read and discussed a short quote from the most recent session of General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, something we do for every family lesson.  For the topic of "Be Proactive" we pulled from the talk "Be Valiant in Courage, Strength, and Activity," by Bishop Gary E. Stevenson.  Here is the quote we used in the lesson:

"Remember, what you do, where you go, and what you see will shape who you become.  

Who do you want to become?" 

Bishop Stevenson went on to quote Pres. Monson saying,

"to make [decisions] wisely, courage is needed--the courage to say no, the courage to say yes....I plead with you to make a determination...

right now, not to deviate from the path which will lead to our goal:: eternal life with our Father in Heaven."

We comprehension-checked our kids about what path we were on and where we were headed (throw back to our preparatory lesson last week).  We quickly segued into the scripture for the night by reminding the kids that agency, or choice, is a gift from Heavenly Father. And onto the scripture! We used as our scripture for the evening 2 Timothy Chapter 1 verse 7, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power."  And this begged the question, "what power has God given us?"

I was certain this would devolve into a conversation about super powers if not checked quickly, but my worries were overblown.  My awesome son quickly answered, "The power to chose--to do what's right!"  Thank you primary leaders!  We continued with the power to be happy, to make our own fun, to make our own decisions, to fill each other's buckets or not (tie-in to our last lesson, to which we continue to refer back).

Perhaps the funniest part of the night was when we checked for comprehension with our daughter.  Keep in mind, she is little.

I called her by name and asked, "Who is in charge of you?"  Her first answer...the name of her best friend.  Her second answer...her pillow pet.  I kept asking, rephrasing slightly each time.  Her dad gave up and told her that she was in charge of herself.  We'll keep working on that.

disclaimer: if you are wondering how I got my kids to answer my questions and pay attention for approximately 20 minutes, I'll tell you.  I bribed them.  Having a coloring page ready helped, but the linchpin was that for each answer they gave, right or wrong, I tossed them a skittle.  That's right--one skittle.  I dished out about 20 skittles in all, including one to my husband for answering a question because he's such a good sport.

All in all, this didn't take very long.  We were going to follow one of the suggestions in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families in which you reinforce the development of conscience in young kids with a treasure hunt, but I ran of time prepping it, and I had found a useful alternative for the skittles anyway.  My kids get a lot of this "make good choices" thing at church, so I didn't feel bad skipping it in favor of playing, especially after such a good discussion.  We may even pull this idea out again at a future home evening or other night at home.  The idea is that you generate some scenarios which would require the kids to make a proactive decision (the good one) or simply react (negatively).  Each proactive/good decision they come up with gets them closer to the treasure, each bad, reactive decision takes them farther away.

After the whole thing was over, my mellow husband stretched and said, "that was good."  And I just beamed!

Next week we'll tackle Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind