Passing on a Legacy

In order to prosper, our children need to gain the insights and social skills necessary to cultivate healthy, stable relationships. As children mature, they must learn to relate to family members, teachers, peers and friends. Eventually they must learn to relate to coworkers and many other types of people such as salespeople, bankers, mechanics and bosses.

Nowhere can appropriate social interaction and relationships be demonstrated more effectively than in the home. At home you learned — and your children will learn — lessons about respect, courtesy, love and involvement. Our modeling as parents plays a key role in passing on a strong social legacy.

Key building blocks of children’s social legacy include:

• Respect, beginning with themselves and working out to other people.
• Responsibility, fostered by respect for themselves, that is cultivated by assigning children duties within the family, making them accountable for their actions, and giving them room to make wrong choices once in a while.
• Unconditional love and acceptance by their parents, combined with conditional acceptance when the parents discipline for bad behavior or actions.
• The setting of social boundaries concerning how to relate to God, authority, peers, the environment and siblings.
• Rules that are given within a loving relationship

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On This Topic

• Introduction • Emotional Legacy • Social Legacy • Spiritual Legacy • Legacy You Want to Give • Emotional Evaluation • Social Evaluation • Spiritual Evaluation