It can be difficult to figure out how to raise your children to be kind, caring, happy, and responsible individuals. At times it can seem like debates about child rearing practices have more to do with issues of pride than honest and objective discussions about which practices are truly best for your children. It is common for parents to put up barriers between each other when they become solely focused on being right about their methods of child raising; however, this is not a healthy environment to raise a child in. You might have noticed that a lot of parents tend to consider the best methods of child education and parenting the methods they happened to choose and use in their own homes; self justification is a common part of human nature. However, just because you do something the way you are used to doing it does not make it the right way of doing things, and this applies just as much in parenting as it does in other areas of life. As fathers, we play a crucial role in positively affecting the developmental outcomes of our children, and we have the unique ability to influence our children in positive ways more than any other person in the entire world besides the mothers of our children. As a result, it is worth taking the time to learn about ways to become a good role model for your children so you can help set them on the right path of growing up healthy, happy, and wise.
The first step to being a good father who acts as a role model for your children is to realize that children learn by observing how people interact and treat each other in your home and elsewhere. We’ll focus on interactions within the home for now. Most people understand at this point that children will pick up a lot of behaviors and habits just by watching adults around them, but many people do not understand that it is not enough to just act nicely in front of children if you go back to doing mean things when you think they are not around. As a father, you need to bring your best work to the job of fatherhood day in and day out, and not just when the job is easy. If you treat your wife respectfully when your children are at the dinner table but treat her poorly once the children are upstairs, they aren’t going to be fooled; your actions will reveal themselves in strained silences and uncomfortable body language throughout the house. Your children will implicitly understand that something is wrong, whether because their mother acts differently when you’re not around or because you act differently when she isn’t around or because they see you treat her poorly when you think they aren’t around.
If you’re going to set an example, you need to set it consistently, and not just when you think you are being watched. If you have bad habits like gambling, cheating, stealing, drinking excessively, engaging in drug use, or any other kinds of things that you probably wouldn’t do in front of your children, it is likely that your children will begin to engage in many of these habits when they become teenagers no matter how hard you try to hide such behaviors of them. This is because children are far more perceptive than most adults give them credit for; you were a child once, and there are probably a lot of things adults thought you didn’t understand but you actually did. It is no different with your kids or with any other children today; they will learn as much from what you don’t do as they do from what you actually do. However, there is a bright side to the idea that children pick up everything: if you show them good habits, they will learn them too!