Parenting and Resourceful Children

All parents want their children to grow up to be resourceful, independent and well balanced young people, who enjoy their lives and feel secure and loved.

This process begins from an early age when we do simple things like encourage our children to dress themselves, bath themselves and cope on their own at school. As well as encouraging independence, parents should also be thinking about encouraging their children to be resourceful.

Allow Children To Have Their Own Ideas

It is very easy to spoon feed our children for too long, giving them everything they could possibly need or want in any situation. It is far better to allow our children to make discoveries for themselves, and encourage them to find ways to do things and keep themselves occupied and entertained.

Children find great delight in making their own choices and discoveries, and this starts from any early age with the simplest of things such as finding out what happens when you mix two paint colours together, right up to making choices about how to do their homework, make friends and find a hobby that they enjoy.

Give Your Children Freedom

Children need boundaries and guidelines, and although overly permissive parenting has become increasingly popular in recent times, allowing your child to have absolute freedom does not always encourage resourcefulness. In fact it can have quite the opposite affect.

Children who are given access to everything are often those who are over indulged and don’t actually have to think for themselves very much at all. Because their parents have simply allowed them the ultimate freedom to do and behave as they wish, without clearly defined boundaries they will not necessarily become truly resourceful.

Guidance Is Key

Instead, make suggestions to your children about things, give them the tools in terms of confidence and self esteem to make informed choices and decisions, and then allow them the freedom to find solutions. This way they draw on their own, true resources while acknowledging that there are boundaries and guidelines for life, and why they are so important.

Children need help and guidance at every stage of their development, and need to understand why boundaries are needed while at the same time having confidence instilled in them that allows them to find solutions to problems, and ways to occupy, entertain and amuse themselves.

Simple acts like encouraging your child to order their own food in a restaurant, paying for their own sweets and comics in a shop, asking the way to somewhere, finding out about opening times of the cinema or just finding the best way to get A to fit into B, are all methods that are simple but will really help your child to develop their resourcefulness and independence from an early age.

Having a resourceful child who can call on their own knowledge and expertise to problem solve and make informed choices and decisions, also makes your life as a parent much easier. It means that you know your child can cope in certain situations, and with their knowledge and understanding of the importance of boundaries will find a way through most situations independently.