Giving Your Child the Excellence Edge

We can give our children an edge in life by teaching them ten basic skills or strategies.

Articles within this series

by Vicki Caruana

We can give our children an edge in life by teaching them ten basic skills or strategies. These strategies will help them grow into productive adults who live fulfilling lives and form lasting relationships.

The best place for children to learn these principles is at home, where we adults are practicing them to enhance our own lives.

Here are the ten strategies that can help prepare our children for their future.

Produce Quality Work. Quality means doing more than was expected—above and beyond the call of duty.
Work Independently. Learning to work independently doesn't happen at school.
Think Creatively. Creative thinkers know how to consider possible effects and outcomes.
Think Critically. Teach a child how to tell the difference between the truth and a lie and he will be more successful in life.
Manage Information Efficiently. Obtaining useful information is an important skill. Organizing information is equally vital.
Work Cooperatively. In a family, we must work with the needs of others in mind.
Communicate Effectively. Everyone suffers when the communication is faulty.
Lead with Confidence. Anyone with more than one child knows that some are natural leaders and some are decided followers.
Manage Time. How children learn to spend their time now influences how they spend their time in school and later as adults.
Assess Yourself. What children believe is true about themselves is largely determined by what others think of them.

Most parents already possess and use many of these strategies, but there is always room for improvement. The best way to teach these values to your children is to model them.

Begin by targeting one or two areas of concern at a time and have fun watching your child grow.

Produce Quality Work

It’s never too soon to teach your children to produce quality work. In a nutshell, quality means doing more than is expected—going above and beyond the call of duty.

If our children are going to grow into adults who produce quality work, we help them by cultivating that ability now while they’re in school, the ideal training ground for practicing quality work.

Before leading your child in the quest for quality, it’s important to consider whether you produce quality work. Do you pursue quality in your work, at home, and in your relationships with others? A quality worker …

is aware of his strengths and weaknesses.
is aware of something in his life that could use improvement and takes steps to make it happen.
accepts constructive criticism without getting defensive.

is confident enough about his job performance to sign his name to it.
can be trusted to keep his promises.
is aware of when others produce quality and lets them know he has noticed.

Considering the quality we pursue develops a new self-awareness. Then we can encourage this awareness in our children. That lays their foundation for personal improvement in the future.

Activity

The Cookie Quality Test

This activity will help you impart the idea of quality to your children in a fun and memorable way. It’s also great tasting. Use the application points to help make the connections to quality in other areas of your children's lives.

Materials Needed: Five different brands of chocolate chip cookies, placed in baggies and numbered so only you know which is which.

1. Tell your children something like this: “Many different cookies in the store claim to be the best, but today we're going to find out for ourselves.”

Explain that quality tests include both subjective and objective measurements. If necessary, define the terms “objective” and “subjective.” For a test to be objective, it must be “blind”—but not all blind tests are objective. For instance, a personal preference like taste is nearly always subjective.

2. Ask the children simply to look at the different cookies. Then have them create a list of criteria for the quality test. These might include taste, ingredients, number of chips, aroma, size, shape and color.

3. Create a chart so they’ll be able to rank each cookie by the various criteria. Taste may be included and will probably carry a lot of weight in the decision. Yet you should explain that it is most subjective. Tell them this makes judging quality difficult because everyone has a different sense of taste.

4. Have the children rate each cookie by the various criteria from 1 to 5 (5 representing the highest quality and 1 the lowest).

5. Add up the points. From the total, rank each cookie from lowest to highest quality.

6. Discuss the testing process and whether some criteria are more subjective or less and whether it was worthwhile to consider the criteria you did. Finally, discuss why successful cookie makers feel it is worthwhile to be concerned about quality.

For further application: You may find that each child has different ideas of what makes quality cookies. Begin by discussing why it is important to be as objective as possible when deciding quality. Then discuss what makes the following things have quality.