3 Tips For Teaching Your Children Respect For Their Elders
If you’d like to instill in your children a respect for others, especially their elders, there are a few things that you can do to help with this while also teaching them how to respect themselves and create boundaries.
To help you see how this could be done within your family, here are three tips for teaching your children respect for their elders.
Teach Them That Others Have Inherent Value
Many times, the best way to teach young children about respecting others is to start with learning about respecting themselves.
To do this, you should share with your children that everyone has inherent value in who they are. This includes your children, people they know, people they don’t know, people who look differently than them, and everything in between.
Because many children can be nervous around older people, you might want to put more of a focus on how older people also have value and are real people who matter. You can help them to learn this by paying attention to others when you’re around them and respectfully interacting with everyone you run into during the day.
Show Them What Respect Look Like
As was mentioned above, there are things that you can do on a daily basis that can help to show your kids what it looks like to respect others, including the elders of your family or community.
While it can be easy to get caught up in your own life and see other people as simply an obstacle that you need to maneuver around, if your kids see you do this, they can start to think about people this way as well. And when this happens, respect can be hard to come by. But by being more conscious about how you treat people and talk about people when in the presence of your kids, you can be an example to them of how to respect others and express themselves in a respectful manner.
Facilitate Spending More Time With The Elderly
Often, it can be hard to practice respect for your elders if your kids don’t spend much time around elderly people. Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this.
If you have grandparents or other elderly people in your life, try to make a conscious effort to spend more time with them as a family. This can include visiting them in senior living communities, spending time in their homes, or visiting them in community centers. And if you don’t have personal connections with elderly people in your life, you can always volunteer to serve elderly people in your area and get your kids some exposure to this demographic of people in this way.
If you’re wanting to do better at teaching your children how to respect their elders, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn how this can be done.
