11 Old-Fashioned Lessons Brilliant Parents Still Teach Their Kids
Teaching kids empathy, respect, and competency starts early their lives.
Evgeniya Grande | Shutterstock.com There’s no such thing as a “perfect parent,” but there are incredibly important ways for parents to show up for their kids — teaching them empathy, compassion, trust, respect, and honesty in ways that genuinely add value to their lives, even into adulthood. This kind of profound impact lives in the ways parents demonstrate model behavior, teach important lessons, and even emotionally support their kids through challenging times.
While modern parenting has certainly caused debate in modern discussions online, there are several old-fashioned lessons brilliant parents still teach their kids that can add nuance to new parenting styles and initiatives. From teaching emotional intelligence to contextualizing self-care and confidence, sometimes the traditional way is more impactful than modernized approaches.
Here are 11 old-fashioned lessons brilliant parents still teach their kids
1. Expressing gratitude about the little things
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By modeling gracious behavior, like thanking their partner for coffee in the morning or holding the door open for a stranger, parents can ensure their kids grow up with a foundation of empathy to guide their interactions.
According to Harvard Health, children who learn to express gratitude early in life will reap a number of positive benefits, from experiencing higher rates of happiness to living healthier, more fulfilling lives. Reaping the emotional benefits of spreading joy, empathetic people who value and express gratitude for the small things tend to cultivate better relationships, both with themselves and others.
2. Telling the people in your life that you love them
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Expressing love can look different for every individual and unique relationship, experts from BetterHelp explain, but teaching kids lessons about love doesn't necessarily need to get complicated.
Just encouraging your kids to tell their friends and family members that they love them can be enough. Reminding them to be grateful for small things and teaching them about the sanctity of life can be profound enough for young minds to form their own gracious mindsets.
3. Taking accountability for your mistakes
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Taking accountability for your mistakes can be uncomfortable, even for adults, so expecting kids to perfect the art of self-awareness isn’t necessarily realistic. Instead, parents who teach their children to take accountability for productive mistakes that lead to growth and consequential mistakes that lead to constructive criticism plant the seeds of responsibility in their kids early on.
Of course, modeling that behavior — where parents take accountability for their own mistakes and talk their kids through the importance of being honest and vulnerable — is most influential for young minds.
4. Standing up for what you believe
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Giving kids the keys to self-aware activism and an outspoken mindset starts with teaching them confidence. When kids feel valued and celebrated for their unique identities at home, their anxieties about external validation and judgement don’t keep them from standing up for themselves and what they believe in.
Carey Wallace explains that the best advocates — whether in the area of political advocacy or simply personal confidence — tend to learn how to speak up for what they believe in from their parents. They were given the knowledge, tools, and resources to do so early in life, cultivating a lasting aura of confidence.
5. It’s okay to ask for help
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Asking for help can be intimidating, especially for adults who were taught to be hyper-independent, selfish with their success, and inherently self-indulgent. Of course, it’s not all their fault. Kids tend to learn how to interact with others and chase success from their parents. When they’re not taught that accepting help and asking for advice is actually productive, they fear it.
People who ask for help and advice are typically perceived as more competent by their peers, meaning kids who learn this skill early in life are set up for success in a wide variety of arenas.
6. If you fall, get back up
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Reminding kids that making a mistake doesn’t equate to failure can hone their ability to persevere and maintain a confident mindset in adulthood. Adult children who were taught the old-fashioned lesson of falling and getting right back up face challenges head on and curiously engage in conversations, activities, and situations they’re not fully confident in.
There’s power in discomfort, especially for young adults and children still developing their identities and navigating their personal lives, as communications expert and director Ashley Robertson explains. By instilling this lesson into children early in life, you teach them how to navigate conflicts in relationships, succeed through challenges at work, and prioritize their own personal well-being.
7. Acknowledge when you’re wrong
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Teaching kids to acknowledge when they’re wrong isn’t just profoundly impactful for the health of their relationships, it teaches them to be comfortable with discomfort. Even in high-pressure situations or battling uncomfortable emotions like embarrassment, kids that were taught to take accountability and apologize are generally more self-aware adults than those who weren’t.
By modeling this kind of behavior at home and leading with empathy in the face of disappointment, parents can ensure their kids are equally comfortable with discouraging situations and accountable for their own mistakes, shortcomings, and passively hurtful actions.
8. Be kind to everyone
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Parenting consultant Albiona Rakipi shared that teaching kids empathy isn’t always the easiest venture, as the complexities of human life, love, and struggle can be overwhelming for a child without a contextualized perspective of the world. However, teaching them to lead with kindness and compassion when interacting with anyone is a good place to start.
Not only are they more likely to build their own self-esteem through meaningful interactions with friends, peers, teachers, and even strangers, but they tend to cultivate healthier relationships that influence their identities early in life.
9. Respect others, but also respect yourself
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Teaching kids to respect themselves and others seems like a basic principle, but it often feels harder to achieve given younger generations’ technological accessibility, self-esteem and mental health struggles, and of course, modern parenting dilemmas like relearning emotional intelligence.
According to experts from Positive Parenting Solutions, teaching children lessons about respect starts at home with parents who cultivate a safe space for kids’ voices to be heard and valued. Alongside respecting other people, teaching kids about self-respect and confidence starts with parents who already prioritize healthy habits in their own lives.
We learn how to respect ourselves by watching how our parents care for themselves, according to a study from The Journal of Early Adolescence. While it might feel like an old-school lesson, respecting ourselves and others is fundamentally important to our adult relationships, well-being, and life.
10. Honesty is the best policy
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According to the Greater Good Science Center, teaching children about trust and honesty is foundational for the health of their future relationships. Of course, in addition to discussing the importance of honesty with their kids in order to teach them this lesson, they should also be modeling honesty themselves and responding to their kids’ dishonesty with firm consequences.
11. Patience is a virtue
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Considering our culture runs on instant gratification, many children today struggle with patience. While it’s much more difficult to teach the principle, alongside technological accessibility and new-age parenting concerns, there are several ways for parents to model healthy behavior with specific phrases and actions.
By creating small opportunities to praise patience on a daily basis and modeling their own patience in the face of exciting opportunities, parents can ensure their kids understand the value of patience in their personal and professional lives as they grow up.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a staff writer with a bachelor’s degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.