Our children’s self worth should have many pillars supporting it so that they are less vulnerable to challenges in one specific area and are more able to stay true to themselves.
This is especially true when it comes to their friends. Having a few friend groups builds authenticity in 3 unique ways – read more in today’s infographic! Download your PDF copy here.
Is authenticity a skill your child would benefit from improving?
Each child’s umbrella looks different depending on the experiences that they have had thus far in their lives. Download this infographic to get a better understanding of where your children are in their development of authenticity.
“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” ― Brené Brown
This quote from Brené Brown really captures one of the most pivotal lessons of authenticity and all the umbrella skills. They are choices.
Every day you can choose to be real, honest, kind to yourself and every day is a new day to make this choice. Understanding our ability to choose is where true empowerment lies – not from wishing the rain away.
Teach your child this valuable lesson by modelling these choices yourself.
All the pieces of your umbrella are important and work best together! As you focus on authenticity skills this month, be sure to remember the other skills in your umbrella to get the most out of this great skill. Sometimes authenticity in the absence of cognitive flexibility, mindfulness or empathy (to name a few), can diminish its value.
Why? Helping our children find their authentic voice is very important for future wellbeing, but can’t be at the sacrifice of their adaptability.
Swearing off vegetables for the rest of your life because you aren’t a vegetable person is not authenticity at its best. Neither is making everyone around you march to your drum beat all the time. We are social creatures and finding the balance between being authentic and having strong, compassionate relationships is critical. Healthy authenticity is not a staunch belief that you are always right, closing your mind to all other opinions.
Authenticity work best when you keep an open mind, become a great listener, try many new things and keep your values always open to shifting based on new information.
Over the holidays, I had the less-than-brilliant idea of letting the kids open a few gifts in advance of Christmas.
We selected a small gift for my seven-year-old son to open on the 23rd, a little transformer. He opened the gift and played for a minute or two before declaring that he wasn’t really keen on the gift and wanted to open a different gift or return this one to the store in exchange for another. Certainly not his best moment of gratitude or my best moment of parenting as I launched into a solid lecture on why what he said was ungrateful and not okay. His tears flowed as he reminded me about last year when I had told him that it’s okay to be honest with me if he didn’t like a gift. Oops! Not only did I forget about that, but I also lost sight of the big picture – his umbrella of wellbeing.
For me, there are a few takeaways from that moment.
First, while my son may not have been great at gratitude in that moment he was very authentic, sharing his true feelings with me which I, in return, told him were not okay. Instead, I could have thanked him for being honest with me and explained a better way to share those feelings. Recognizing kids for being honest and authentic is a great way to help them use that strength more often.
Second, the skills of wellbeing are built over a lifetime. We can look at childhood as a time of building towards a fuller expression of these skills. In that context, my son is at best one-third of the way to a complex development of gratitude. There was really no need at all to get on my parenting soap box; rather, I should have coached him through the process of developing and understanding gratitude. All too often we use frustration or out-of-proportion responses that can suppress our child’s authenticity. By viewing your children as works in progress, you can relax about the small moments and help them build their identity through their own trial and error.
In fact, we are all a work in progress and it’s important to look at ourselves this way too. Parenting is a tough job and mistakes are normal and expected. Make sure you are equally kind to yourself as your umbrella continues to grow.
Featured image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.