Crucial Skills To Teach Children

In a recent interview I gave for an article on crucial skills to teach kids, I shared the following three ideas:

1. Kids must learn early about standing up to social pressure. Even in the pre-school years they experience social hierarchies and face peer pressure. Parents must help them learn about being confident in their own opinions and choices, and not to let others kids pressure them into wrong behaviors.

2. Parents must also let their kids experience failure, rejection and an occasional skinned knee. It’s painful to watch, and it goes against every parental instinct. But if we protect our kids too much, we deprive them of the very experiences that make them resilient.

3. Kids must also learn early about kindness and community service. Take them to the park to pick up trash. Bake cookies with them and give them to the neighbors. Give them opportunities to help others and it will shape them into more loving people.