Kids, they are blissful, imaginative, carefree, charismatic and intelligent. All of these things – whether we like it or not – seem to fade a little as we grow up. We become stressed with school, work, paying bills, getting the kids to their sports. We put the majority of our creativity and carefree attitudes into a little box at the back of our brains and only call on it once in a blue moon. This means we sometimes lose sight of the important things – the little things, as we talked about in our last blog post- and we focus our attention on everything else.
Although we have so much to teach our kids, let’s remember that we still have so much to learn from them. Don’t you want to have some – if not all of those characteristics listed above? Sometimes we need to stop stressing, put down the book or the bills, and go help your kids build the best blanket fort you’ve ever built. Go for a bike ride, paint a picture or go play soccer in the park. When you do these things with your kids you are teaching them to value the little things – which are really important to a person’s overall health and quality of life – so while we call them little things, they really are “big” or essential things to our lives.
According to the Children First Canada “1 in 5 teens have considered suicide in the past 12 months. That’s more than a million youth”. Why is this number so high? Maybe if we can start teaching our children to retain their carefree, blissful characteristics we can teach them to have a full life, throughout their lives.
When people are happier, they are healthier, they are more motivated, overall they feel in more in control of their lives. By learning from their characteristics and using them to create good habits for you and your child, you are bettering both of these lives. While creating a bond to help you teach them about their rights to a happy and healthy life, as well as teaching them that nobody has a right to take that right away from them – as is stated in the UN Convention on Rights of a Child. If you model what you want their life to be when they grow up, they will be able to take these habits with them and continue to create a fulfilling life for themselves on the base that you provided. If we can teach our kids that they deserve to always remain blissful, imaginative, carefree, charismatic and intelligent, then this provides us with hope that we will have happier, safer and healthier Youth (and even Adults as they age).
Learning about their rights is not only essential to their quality of life as children and Youth, but also their overall quality of life. So let’s remember all the amazing qualities of our children and learn from them while they are learning from us.
https://www.childrenfirstcanada.com/purpose
Kaitlyn Sage
Teagan's Voice 