As a parent, your primary priority is your children. Their wellbeing, and their future and current happiness, are never far from your mind, and much of the effort you put into your own career and your own life is indirectly or directly linked to this priority. But when planning the future happiness of your children, you need to think outside the box to anticipate the kinds of futures they’re likely to encounter. In this article, you’ll find some of this anticipatory advice – to help you make the most of your kids’ lives now, and in their more grown-up future.
Anticipating Maturity
One of the most interesting and flummoxing experiences that all parents encounter is the maturing of their children. From toddlers to children, through puberty to their teenage years, kids seem to change, develop and mature with such speed that you can sometimes fail to realize just how grown up they’re getting. But as a parent, it’s important to make time and to find the emotional space to reflect on the maturity and developmental phase that your kids are going through. With puberty the crunch moment of your children’s development, try and anticipate what your kids will want in this topsy-turvy phase – often, this means less parental guidance – and ensure they have the space to grow, learn and stay safe on their own.
Material Goods
Meanwhile, every single parent will be aware of the changes that take place in the bodies of their kids – primarily, that’s in their height. It’s with an air of profound exasperation that you’ll find your kids’ school uniforms don’t fit them year-on-year, and you have to go through the laborious process of finding new clothes for them with a frequency that can be startling. One interesting way to counter this is to anticipate the future height of your children through a calculator – like this online height calculator. Armed with the knowledge of how tall your child is likely to become, you’ll be able to prepare their wardrobe in advance – an important cost-saving exercise for those families struggling to find cheap clothes for their children.
Lessons and Learning
There’s a good deal of education that takes place in school, but this represents only the tip of the iceberg of experiences and lessons that your children will encounter on their journey towards adulthood. Actually, most of the formational years of a young person’s life are spent at home, or in the company of friends, where they learn the key social skills that’ll help them develop with confidence in the future. Your responsibility, as a grown-up, is to expose your child to as much social learning as possible, while also making their home life as educational as possible – not in academic pursuits, but in motor skills, life skills, and the kind of lessons that only a parent can emphatically deliver to their child.
Financial Responsibility
Meanwhile, the element that supports your child’s upbringing in the background is, of course, the financial health that your whole family exists in. Multiple studies show that the more secure a family’s finances, the happier the home for the children of the family. Equally, when your children do leave school for college, university, or for an internship in their first job, they’ll need a little capital to support them in their first adventures in the world of young adults. If you’re able to save a little trust fund for your kids’ development into adults, you’ll be providing the useful springboard towards their future success.
Nurturing Talent
You know your children better than anyone else, and you’ll have seen what they like, what they display flair in, and what they’re disinterred by. As such, you’re the responsible adult that’s able to direct them towards the sort of skills and careers that they’ll enjoy for the whole of their lives. Your responsibility here is also a privilege: you get to help shape the future of your child, with their input, for the whole of their young life. By taking them to clubs, exposing them to different parts of the world around them, and encouraging them to follow their dreams, you’ll be able to create a well-rounded child that’s well-suited to the environment that they eventually find themselves in. Nurture your child’s talent in order to help them achieve the heights that they deserve to achieve, and be prepared to make small sacrifices to support their development.
There you have it: some key pointers to help you plan for the happy future of your offspring, from the cradle through to the point at which they fly from the nest forever.