While millionaires are made over the weekend with the kickoff of the NFL Draft, my household is just trying to stay afloat. Between the end of sports seasons and the school year, this may be my family’s busiest time of the year.
As with these chaotic times, sports often provides me a late-night, after-the-kids-are-asleep way to pull the release valve and zone out. The pageantry of the NFL Draft, though, has my mind racing about the qualities I’d draft at the top of my parenting board – the top attributes that I’d like to see in my kids.
Here are my Top Five:
Pick #1: Curiosity
With so much information readily available to our kids via YouTube or Tik Tok or whatever, I’m seeing organic curiosity wane in young people. Our kids know outcomes well, they know little, though, about the process. I want my kids to ask “Why?” and “How?” three times as often as they explain “What”. Curiosity has so many veins that lead to innovation, entrepreneurship, and challenging established norms. Curiosity propels kids to try new things without any regard for results, it has them prioritizing doing rather than getting it done. Gimme a curious kid over a smart one anytime!
Pick #2: Grit
Angela Duckworth may have brought the quality of “grit” into the focus of parents in 2016 with her book of the same name, but I don’t see it often enough in my kids. Answers are easy to come by for our young people. In fact, finding the correct solution is so quick and easy that NOT doing so seems wasteful by the time high school rolls around.
Grit in a “right now” world is more important than ever – not to get the correct answer on a test, but to wade through new challenges that are far less black and white. The challenges I see kids struggle with involve anxiety, confidence, starting on an uncertain path, making connections, and seeing something all the way to the finish line. Grit is not only about pushing through, it is about living within struggle with the understanding that better is on the other side.
Pick #3: Kindness
I believe that kindness lives in most of our youngest kids. I see it at my daughter’s elementary school every day. But, then social forces and puberty transition our middle schoolers into selfish, “me first” teens, kindness takes a back seat to competition.
The thing is, my teens do flash streaks of selflessness and kindness – just not often enough to the people they are surrounded by the most (ie: siblings and parents). I’d take the simplest form of kindness in my house on most days, so I’ll start with how my kids treat each other. Once my kids master household kindness, I’ll push to extend a similar kindness to the greater community, classmates, and world around them.
My motto: be elementary school kind.
Pick #4: Self Assuredness
Kids that do not have a core idea of who they are might be the problem that I see looming most in this age of parenting. Self concept used to be something kids developed through experience. Now kids become more aware of their surrounding before they are secured in their place in them – their strengths, interests, unique things they bring to any room they enter.
A self assured young person is a confident leader, a helper, a community builder. I want that kid on my team every day.
Pick #5: Agile
The shortening timeline of everything from news, to deadlines, to research, to movie theaters-to-watching at home flicks, tells me that a successful, future adult must be able to quickly react appropriately to the changing world around them. As I age, my own tendency is to be slowly, but eventually, adapt to new technologies, new methods, new work styles, new objectives, new metric to measure us real-time. That’s not good enough.
No one can afford to “warm up” to changes anymore – we need to dare to charge at them. A kids’ life is filled with ever-changing shifts – new teammates, new coaches, teachers coming and going more than they used to, class that might be online one week and in-person the next. Agility is key to our young people successfully maneuver through the daily peaks and valleys they are/will be experiencing.
No millionaires were made here, but maybe future leaders will be. I’d encourage your family to come up with a “Top 5” list and, more importantly, a plan to showcase these qualities as you see them at home.
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As I wrote this, I remembered a similar piece about Over/Under Rated qualities in kids from a few years ago. If you are interested, the link to that piece is here.
