I love that we celebrate fathers passed and present. I lost my dad more than 20 years ago yet I think of him and cherish with gratitude the life lessons he taught me. Some lessons I learned long after he passed. Why? Because I wasn’t wise enough in my younger years to get the lesson. Reflection is good. Think about your dad, what he represents, what he stands for, what he taught you by his actions, his words and how he showed up each day in your home.
Here are 6 things dad’s can do that will leave a lasting and positive impact on the lives of their children:
1. Teach your children the importance of play. Turn off the TV. Spend time with your kids having fun. Play evokes fun and laughter, which have enormous benefits. Play not only makes us feel good, it’s good for us because it brings balance to all components of the immune system. Studies show that play is at the core of creativity and innovation. A success skill for life. Play shapes the brain, making your children more adaptable and smarter. Play and laughter are the joyful threads that run through a family’s life creating some of the very best memories that bind you together. There is nothing like rekindling those fun and happy cherished memories that make us feel good as time rolls on.
2. Feed your kids with good news, good books, positive people, and positive activities. It affects their mind, their happiness and how they view the world – friendly and happy or hostile and pessimistic. Research shows that happy people have better outcomes in life than pessimists. You can help to enrich and nourish their thoughts and dreams into life by sharing positive experiences of life.
3. Your words are powerful and effect young minds. Be at your best by giving away all the words of encouragement, acknowledgement and motivation that you can at every opportunity. Speaking positive, good words breathes a new sense of life, light, and happiness into your children, as well as creating a deeper sense of your love for them.
4. Speak with optimism. When you are optimistic you create a sense that the world is a friendly place conspiring at every corner to help you. It helps create resilience. You see the best in everything and everyone. You’re children will pick up on your vibe and learn a valuable skill for life. Teach them that “every cloud has a silver lining” so that when adversity, setbacks, failures, and hardship happen, they can turn them into something positive by finding greater meaning in life from them. Optimism gives your children the motivation to continue to persist to find solutions even in the bleakest of situations. Optimism has a way of creating a ripple effect of positive and good energy. Research shows that optimists tend to succeed above others in life and are physically healthier, more productive and do better at work, school and in sports.
5. Act out with gratitude for the smallest of things. It’s a way of cultivating an attitude of appreciation. It teaches your children to learn to count their blessings not other peoples which mass media focuses on, depleting young minds so they feel that they or what they have is not enough. This is not true. Only the practice of gratitude can shift this mindset. Too many walk around sabotaging themselves by believing they are not enough because they never learnt this skill. Teach them to value what they have including what most people take for granted, for example their legs that gets them to and from school and teach them to appreciate everything that others do for them.
6. Teach your children forgiveness. Unforgiveness can be crippling. It is a burden in the mind and heart. Forgiveness is about freeing yourself. Teach your children to free themselves from the hurt and time and energy it takes away from their life. Teach them to learn the lesson, the gift in every situation, for example, if someone presented with a quality that hurt him or her, get him or her to see that the lesson is not to take on that quality in their own life, to learn to do and be better. Forgive the person, learn the lesson, let it go and be free.
So dads strengthen your children for life’s journey ahead, deepen the love between you and leave a great inheritance to your children by teaching them valuable life lessons just like my dad did. Happy Father’s Day!
Family