With one child wrapping up her Senior year in June and another in her freshman year of high school, I’ve given considerable thought to what is most important for them to learn before graduating. Not surprisingly, the things I find most important have little to do with academics. On the flip side, the formal education years can be an excellent practice field for learning life’s most important life lessons about loving and serving others, avoiding entitlement, and persevering.
1. Personal success begins with loving and serving others. As a woman and mother, I’ve been counseled more than once that I must take care of myself first because only then will I be capable of taking care of my family and others. The analogy often used is from the crashing plane scenario – “You must put on your OWN oxygen mask FIRST.” I agree with this on a basic level. For instance, I agree that I need to get enough sleep, eat well, and allow time to shower and maintain proper hygiene. I even believe I need to allow for personal time, but from what I can see mine and my children’s generations have stretched this concept to the point where we serve self above all else.
Perched on pedestals of self, our eyes scan a horizon clear of others. We need to step down so we can look our family, friends and community in the face and see the unmet needs and desire for warmth and our loving kindness.
I’m not talking about raising bleeding hearts. I’m talking about teaching our children (and in my case, myself) that the measure of a day’s success is multifaceted. Yes, I need to work and pay my bills, but I also need to encourage, support, and genuinely interact with those I’m blessed to encounter on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Isabel Kallman at AlphaMom is a fabulous encourager. She once responded to an email query of mine with the words, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Her response was to my specific request to link to a blog outside of her blogging network; she assured me that when moms support each other in any way, we all benefit from it. Is it any wonder her business has been a success?
I believe the strongest leaders are servant leaders because they understand the needs of those around them. Servant leaders will know success beyond the dollar; overall, they’ll receive what they exhibit–love and respect.
2. Personal success is not an entitlement. This subject has been a major topic of conversation in our home over the last few weeks. While I would love to say that the entitlement virus is an isolated event, it isn’t.
The kids have a few summer camps they want to attend. The camps aren’t cheap, and Jeff and I do not plan on footing the bill 100%. Our kids’ first reaction to us saying they’d need to cover half the cost displayed the depth of their feelings of entitlement. We are their PARENTS, after all; we’re SUPPOSED to pay for their camps, right? Ummm…no.
We’re still learning the balance between giving and teaching earning potential. After reading through Dave Ramsey’s Smart Money Smart Kids, Jeff and I switched our kids’ allowances to commissions. We agreed with Ramsey that the word allowance “implies that a child is ‘allowed’ a certain amount of money just for living and breathing.”
We are also learning that the kids want considerably less when they believe they will have to pay for it.
Our kids should not feel entitled to gain acceptance to any college they want to attend just because they made good grades in high school and scored well on standardized tests. They should not feel entitled to a job when they graduate college just because they did the work, scored well, and have a diploma. They should not feel entitled to a nice apartment, home, or things to fill it. They should not feel entitled to a raise, a promotion, or anything else in life.
Entitlement is contagious; it runs rampant in our country. The only cure to entitlement I’ve found is maturity to recognize we do not always get what we want and contentment in one’s present circumstances. These are attributes of character, which we develop when we love and serve others. And when we do earn personal success, it is all the sweeter because we have the grace to receive it and the love of others to celebrate alongside us.
3. Perseverance is the muscle that gets us to our life’s goals. Defined as “steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success”, perseverance is only tested in the midst of trial; in other words, it costs us.
We don’t learn perseverance by getting what we want right out of the gate. My first almost-post-graduation lesson in perseverance came by getting denied by the only college I ever wanted to attend. Then, my freshman year, I persevered through a year at our local University until proving myself and transferring to the college of my choice (with a 3.825 average, thankyouverymuch) for my sophomore year. I do not test well on standardized tests, which was my initial downfall, but I have always made good grades. My freshman year of college, I spent seemingly endless hours studying and meeting with tutors for math. I did everything in my power to keep my grades high enough to transfer. It was a hard lesson. It broke my heart there for a while, but when many of my friends returned the next year on scholastic probation, I transferred to the University I always wanted to attend proud of the year I put in to make it happen. I never took it for granted, either. I understood the importance of the work it took to get there, and I maintained my focus through my college years.
Meredith is struggling through Algebra. She was doing “well enough,” but there were concepts she wasn’t fully grasping. So, I talked with a friend who teaches Math, talked with Meredith, and we made the decision to back up and rewind. We’re reviewing almost a month’s worth of work, supplementing with an additional text and Khan Academy, and she is beginning to grasp the concepts she was missing. In other words, it is working. It will cost her a month of her summer, but I KNOW she wasn’t getting it. She KNEW she wasn’t getting it. We both KNOW she needs to get it to achieve her goals. So, we are persevering now for the pay-off later.
School is short-lived; it won’t always be about academics. Instead, it will be about a boss’s requirements, a relationship, a start-up company, a goal of any sort. My responsibility is to demonstrate it in my life and give my kids’ opportunities to work that muscle now, so they will have it for later.
What life lessons do you believe kids should know before graduation?
Heather Sanders is a leading homeschooling journalist who desires to inspire families to live, love and learn. Married to Jeff, Heather lives in the East Texas Piney Woods where she currently homeschools three kids using Monarch, an online homeschool curriculum.