How to Empower Your Kids to Live a More Independent Life
As our children start to grow up, they’ll begin to flex their muscles of independence, which means it’s time for us to let them. You want your kids to have a smooth transition into adulthood and be confident in their abilities. While they need to do this themselves — that is independence after all — there are a few ways you can help them. Here are some tips to get you started.
Give Them More Responsibility
While your children may have been setting the table and cleaning up their rooms for years now, it’s time to give them bigger tasks around the house. Figure out a transition from basic to more difficult chores to help them learn the life skills they’ll need once they move out on their own.
For example, you can extend the amount of space they have to take care of from just their bedrooms to include their bathrooms. Show them how to clean the toilet, shower, sink and countertops, and then make that their responsibility. You also can have them make dinner once a week or put them in a laundry rotation. The key is to add on chores slowly and as they’re ready so they don’t feel overwhelmed. Make sure to support them, but do not do it for them — even when you get frustrated because it seems like it’s taking forever.
Teach Them to Manage Their Time
With more responsibility comes a greater strain on their time. They have more homework to complete after school, more extracurricular activities to keep up with, a growing social life and now more chores. This is a great time to teach your children about time management. Start by talking through their schedule with them and everything they need to get done. Ask them to tell you when they’re going to fit everything in that week and how they think they can best manage their time. Provide them with suggestions as needed, but allow them to take the lead. Make sure they know that they are responsible for getting everything done (not you) and that they have to live with the consequences if they forget something.
Once again, it’s important to start slowly and build in extra time for them to get things done. You want to help them foster their independence and give them room to fail and pick themselves back up.
Let Them Out of Your Sight
If you really want your preteens to be independent, you have to give them some space. They can’t (or won’t) try things on their own if you’re hovering in the background ready to save them. Of course you should protect them, but it’s OK to let them struggle a little. Your kids are learning how to solve problems and come up with solutions on their own.
So let them go out with their friends or go to the latest party. Encourage them to deal with their friends, teachers, siblings and others by themselves. Roll back their curfew a little bit and let them stay home alone. Show your preteens that you trust them to make good choices. Just in case you’re still a little worried, you can use a home automation system like ADT Pulse to check in on them from your smartphone while you’re away. This enables you to make sure they got home from school OK, or to see who’s knocking on the door if they call you when they’re home alone.
Let them know that you’re still there to act as a sounding board and that you will absolutely step in to help with bigger problems, but they can start taking on the small stuff.
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