Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk

You read a lot of stuff about children's upbringing. Few things stuck with me and I try to live by: 1) Be consistent on your orders and timeouts; 2) Don't promise what you can't keep; 3) Be simplistic, but be sincere and, most importantly: 4) Be a role model!

While I do believe in all of them, the challenge is actually to put them into practice every single time. For instance, there are days that I'm tired, I don't want to deal with Miss B crying and being annoying, so I give her a free pass instead of putting her in timeout when she didn't speak to me properly. I guess all moms have these moments, or so I hope.

However, for me the most challenging one as she grows and takes notice of my actions is #4 - Be a role model. And believe me, she does not miss anything!

I want her to eat veggies and fruits and not to eat candy during the week. The other day she saw me eating candy (chocolate) during the week and called me out saying: " You said I can't eat candy, but isn't  this candy?"

The other Saturday her Blue Team was playing against the weakest team of the Soccer Team: the Red Team. The Blue Team had a great advantage, something like 8 goals against 0 from the Red Team. We are all moms, screaming and being insane at the sidelines, but we do feel sorry for the other little kids. So we, the Moms of the Blue Team, started to cheer for the little boy to finally open the score for his Red Team. He scored and we all cheered for him. Bianca saw me cheering for him and called me out immediately: " Mom, why are you cheering for the Red Team, you're not supposed to cheer for the Red Team, you're supposed to cheer for the Blue Team!"And she was right!

This pretty much sums up the importance of living by what you're teaching them as well. If you teach them that they should be playing and cheering for their team, you're not supposed to do otherwise.

In the process of educating children, we learn a lot and not only from other parents, magazines and books, but specially from the children themselves. If we all grew up taking these childhood lessons to heart and thus being more sincere and simple, the world would be a much better place.