Your children learn by copying you.

Made by Third Culture Family Therapy

Your children learn by copying you, so be mindful of what you’re teaching them!

We all want our children to succeed, and we’d like them to avoid making the same mistakes we did. So, ask yourself two questions:

1. What values and norms are important for you as a parent to pass on to your children?

2. What behaviours do you want your child to take with them into their adult life?

These questions present us with a clear choice in terms of our own behaviour.

A child doesn’t learn only by imitation, but we do need to know that it’s an important way to communicate information, skills, values and beliefs. Our children will look at us and how we behave around stress or fear, in situations of conflict with other people and in our general social interactions.

Looking at an everyday example of what we may refer to as a little or benign lie:

The phone rings. Your partner doesn’t stand up to take the phone, and instead says “If it’s for me, I’m not home.”
Your child is sitting in the same room, reading a book or playing.
You pick up the phone, and your child hears you say “No, I’m sorry she’s not home, shall I give her a message?”
The truth is that it may be a little, seemingly harmless lie, but you’ve just demonstrated to your child that it’s okay to lie.

Children will see our best and worst behaviours.

Depending on the stage of development, they will experiment with those behaviours in their own lives. Young children develop an understanding of what behaviour is acceptable by following our example. Later on, they will use those learned behaviours in their own contexts.

Your child is an individual who has many other influencers in life.

Children move around in many arenas and are influenced by school, teachers, coaches, relatives, peers, peers’ parents, social media, television and media characters. Different adults in the same household also model diverse behaviours because of their own unique experiences and perspectives. The ideal is that different adults in a household would discuss and agree on common norms and values that they’d like to impart. Children can and usually do cope with different influences and perspectives.

As parents, we can try to be more aware and conscious of which behaviours we practice.

This is a conscious choice in parenting our children. Whilst bearing in mind that we cannot present ourselves as saintly characters who only model appropriate behaviour, what we can do is understand the power of modelling. This can help us as parents to be more mindful of the information we’re imparting to our children.

We consciously choose to teach our children about who they are, what their values are, and how they should conduct themselves as they develop their individuality and eventually move out of our households and into adulthood.

They will imitate you. Use this influence as the force for good than it can be!

Co-written by Nicola Jane Gregory and Jo Green