If you read our 7 Tips for Raising Responsible Children, you know how important it is to raise your kids to be responsible. Most parents use chores and/or pets to begin teaching responsible behavior. Even if your child is mastering those, he or she may still not realize the impact being irresponsible can have on others.
Want a fun way to teach them the concept and help others at the same time? Have a service project assembly line. Find a project that involves several steps which must be repeated multiple times. (Our parent website Teach One Reach One has lots of great free ideas.) Often collections, like bags of school supplies or disaster supplies, make great assembly line service projects. Or maybe you can make multiple batches of cookies or games. Anything that requires multiple steps and you can afford to make several of them.
Continue reading Fun Way for Kids to Practice Responsibility
The other day I was chatting with someone who worked in a school. She recounted the tale of a student who had stolen something from a vending machine. The incident was caught on camera and the offending student was brought in to discuss it.
Let’s be really honest here. When your kids are tiny, it feels as if some tiny precious human is permanently attached to you. As your kids get older, there are often many more kids around than you actually get to claim on your taxes. Yet even with all of these people swarming around you asking for attention and help – motherhood can be extremely lonely. Sometimes, you want to cry for those long ago friendships when you had the time and energy to talk for hours about everything and nothing.
The sad reality is that if you are depending upon the church to teach your kids everything in the Bible, it won’t happen. Even if your congregation has the best ministries in the world, they just don’t have the time to cover everything. Most, for a variety of reasons, will only cover about 10% of what is in the Bible with your kids – even if they attend every possible class from birth through high school graduation.
Admit it. When you read the title of this post, your first thought was probably about teaching kids to “be good” or “do good”. Christianity is much more than being and doing good though. At it’s core is the story of God who lovingly created a world, but more importantly, us.