How to help develop your child’s character

Preparing children for the future and to be ‘world ready’ includes much more than academic strength and resilience. Character development is just as important – it is how we encourage our pupils to become interested and interesting young people who possess self-confidence, self-awareness and multiple skills. Here are some suggested ways that you can support your child’s development outside of school.

The importance of failure and learning from mistakes

Showing children that making mistakes and failing at things is only human and normal, is a way to give them a great foundation to be future ready. Of course, we want everything to be just right for our children and to protect them from bigger world issues, but smoothing out every problem can, long term, be detrimental to their character development. We actively need to show children that it is ok to make mistakes and explain our process of how we deal with them.

Allow children to discover who they are as individuals

Let’s not rush children though childhood, a time where they are enjoying experiencing and learning at such an experiential level. One of the most important ways to help children discover who they are as individuals is by allowing them to try out lots of different things. Giving them the freedom to explore multiple activities will help them to naturally form an understanding of who they are and what they enjoy. Allowing them to enjoy things without pressure is healthy – we want our young people to have a broad range of interests. All of this will help them to develop a strong sense of self.

Set standards that our children can aspire to

We don’t want children trying to live up to unobtainable standards that can cause added stress to their lives. Communicating our standards to our children and allowing them to form their own obtainable standards and values is a great way to help them on their journey.  Recognizing that ‘good enough’ is sometimes a brilliant place to be is important, but it sits alongside developing an honesty in self-reflection.

Teach our children to be kind to themselves

In the current social media era that we are living in, it has never been more important to teach children to be kind to themselves. We all want to develop that inner confidence that comes from unashamedly loving who we are and this comes from honesty about our good and developing parts. This does not result in arrogant young people – this is about an honesty that is voiced with kindness.