Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 299 | Training Your Kids to Interact with Adults

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Ep. 299 | Training Your Kids to Interact with Adults · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Some of the best relationships, some of the best mentoring that our kids have ever received has come from our friends taking an interest in our kids because they are fun to interact with.
• 0:18
  What's up guys, welcome back to 5 Minute Fatherhood. So we wanna talk a little bit about why it's important to train your children at a young age, how to interact with adults. I think this is a really specific area of training,
• 0:34
  but it has huge payoffs and huge consequences either way. And so when, and there's so many opportunities to do this, and obviously when the kids are two, three, four, you're gonna see their personalities, their shyness, you know, some of their anxieties. And so it's really important to be talking to your children and trying to help them through that process of feeling safe, interacting with your friends, people that are close to your family,
• 1:01
  You can start by training them how to interact with grandparents, but it makes a big difference when kids can look an adult in the eye, talk to them, ask them a question, and think about what's at stake. I think that the way that this has been framed is, okay, if you teach kids to be kind, respectful, and how to interact with adults—
• 1:25
  That's respectful to the adult. But if you just let kids follow their impulses and, you know, if they're grouchy, let them be mean or rude or whatever, that's better for the kids. I kind of feel like that's the way some people think about this. So let me talk about it from a little bit different angle.
• 1:43
  And that is if you train your children to really engage with adults, train them to be comfortable around adults that are close to your family in such a way that they become really attractive to the adult and they can form some kind of relationship. I think that is absolutely in the best interest of the child primarily.
• 2:07
  And we've seen this over the years with our family, because what happens is that when an adult really begins to take an interest in your child, again, somebody you totally trust, somebody who's close to your family, they can open up new avenues of the world to your child. And so some of the best relationships, some of the best mentoring that our kids have ever received...
• 2:34
  has come from our friends taking an interest in our kids because they are fun to interact with. Because they, you know, and so when somebody comes over to our house, you know, a stranger that our kids don't know, we want to introduce them to our children, we want our kids to get to know this adult.
• 2:53
  you know, it's not difficult. They quickly build relationships with adults. In fact, you know, Jeff, as you know, so our kids go to public school maybe two to three years out of their kindergarten through 12. And probably in the first week or two, the first thing our kids
• 3:10
  are constantly dealing with is they cannot believe how disrespectful their peers are to adults. And again, when I see that, when I hear that, I think that we have to look at that primarily through the lens of how much that is limiting our children's opportunities in life, their opportunities to be mentored, their opportunities to develop relationships with people that are far wiser than them.
• 3:39
  And all of the way that that can cascade into what direction they can take their life. And so I cannot I can go on about the impact this has had on our children and how many people have impacted them because they're really enjoyable to invest in. Right. But, yeah, Jeff, how do you think about this?
• 4:03
  Yeah, I mean, I think it's just so important, too. And I think we've talked about one thing at family teams, too, is training is not just important to get kids to do something like I think sometimes we do it for like a consumer based reason of I just I just want this or whatever. But you're I think what we've said before is we're not just we're not just training or parenting to our kids or parenting through our kids.
• 4:20
  Meaning like you have to believe that this is about a hundred year legacy or that this is actually about how they will impact the world. And we know and there's other examples and parallels of how you parent in a way or even like live in a way at your work or whatever, where you're just doing it for the short term, just enough to kind of get by or just enough to do this rather than, you know, like here's another way to put it.
• 4:39
  Someone at a job is, I think, is going to train an employee, someone, an employee very different than someone who they know is going to take over the company in 20 years. That's an entirely different training regimen. Right. Another way to put it is like a king and a queen. Right. Like a prince is going to get a very radically different training regimen than maybe like one of the guards at the door.
• 5:03
  You know what I mean? But I think we treat kids like the guards at the door of just do this job. Just here's the bare minimums and just be good. Right. No, no. A prince is a king in training that actually is apprenticed for like 20 years because, you know, they have to run a country sooner or later. And so I just think, yeah, that radically changes how you train kids and why it's so important. Yeah.
• 5:24
  And you guys, if you haven't had a chance to check out our Instagram page, we try to post lots of little insights and kind of glimpses behind the scenes for what's going on with our families and some other families that are part of Family Team. So you can check that out. Check out Family Teams over at Instagram.