Teaching Heritage: Why Your Child's Family History Matters

We need to be proactive about teaching our children important character traits and family heritage instead of constantly correcting behavior after the fact. Understanding where we come from helps our children uncover their identity, drives purpose, and provides answers to behaviors they'll encounter throughout life.

• Teaching children about their heritage helps explain behaviors passed down through generations
• Schools teach history, but parents must teach family heritage and dynamics
• Heritage gives context for certain tendencies and behaviors your children display
• Understanding inherited traits helps you address challenges more effectively
• Try to maintain relationships with both sides of the family for the children's benefit
• Attend family reunions and connect children with extended family when possible
• Collaborate with siblings who may face similar parenting challenges

If you enjoyed today's episode, tell another single mom. Come back next week when I'll be talking about disappointment, how to address it, and how to teach children about this inevitable life experience.

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As Mom's we are more than nurturers we are Mentors to our children.

Chapters

• 0:01 Welcome to Mom to Mentor
• 0:19 From Correcting to Teaching Mode
• 1:26 Understanding Family Heritage Importance
• 2:59 Cultivating Heritage Education
• 4:30 Heritage vs. History Teaching
• 8:54 Episode Wrap and Next Week Preview

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey ladies, welcome to the Mom to Mentor podcast. If this is your first time joining, welcome. If you are a Repeat listener, thank you for your loyalty. Hey, I'm back in the saddle again, ladies. As you know, for these past few weeks, I've been talking about planting character seeds in your children because it's up to us to teach our children. And if we don't do it, somebody else will. And that's why we get into correcting mode. It's not teaching our children. It's just correcting behavior. But if we're proactive and start teaching them ahead of time the things that are important in life, it's going to save us a lot of time in correcting mode. I'm just saying, with raising my children, I found myself just being always in correcting mode. Don't do this, don't do that, don't say this, don't say that. But had I taught them in advance, I wouldn't have had to come back and do as much correcting. That's still a part of parenting. But if you take the time to teach them, you have minimal correcting that you will need to do. All right, so what am I talking about today? It's not necessarily planning a character seed, but it is something that I believe that you should teach your children that is extremely important. And that is their heritage. Now, when we send them to school, and what the school is responsible for doing and does is they teach history. Okay, and that's fair. I mean, does it really add value later on? Display as they were growing up and still displaying. You know, for instance, my mom, she liked to keep everything. No fault with that, right? As long as she didn't become a hoarder per se, and she kind of managed it. But I know that me myself, I also am not a fan of getting rid of stuff. I'd rather buy another bin and put stuff in it than to get rid of it. That's not a good thing, right? Because now I have a whole lot of bins of stuff that I don't use. But I acquired that because of my mom, because that's what she does. That's what she did. She she held on to stuff for a long time. She reused it, she recycled it. And again, there's nothing wrong with that, but now I understand why I have a tendency to not let go of things. You know, another example is my mom likes nuts. She ate pecans, cashews, and all other kinds of nuts. And I am the same way. My dad, he was a numbers person. And so it's no mystery, no secret. Why I'm really in tune with numbers. I'm always looking at my numbers as it relates to this podcast. I'm looking at how many people are listening, how long they're listening for, are there new listeners? He was a numbers person. So where am I going with this, ladies? Heritage issues or hereditary handed down to us. So you have to explain that to your children. And that's why that's important. And also, it all helps them uncover their identity and it drives purpose. And you will understand those certain behaviors and how to address them. It's preparation for physical and mental challenges you're going to encounter. You're getting ready to get answers to questions you haven't even asked yet. Think about that. Like, why am I acting this way? Okay. And again, the example I gave as it relates to my mom. Why can't I get rid of stuff? Right? And some of it is mental, but most of it is because I acquired this behavior from her. Now, how do we educate our children about heritage and what do we do? How do we cultivate that? You know, with my kids' father, you know, we didn't make it, but I maintained a relationship with his mom. And so I was able to get family history from that side. And so as a result of that, now it's no mystery to me if my kids displayed a certain type of behavior, and I know it didn't come from my side of the family, then it probably came from his side. And so again, I could sit and talk with his mom and say, Well, how did you handle this situation when he behaved this way? That's why it's important that we talk to our children. We educate our children about where they came from. If there were relationship issues along the generational line, then guess what? You will want to educate them about that. If they struggle with anger, I promise you, it probably has appeared somewhere else along the line that you can talk to someone about that and say, How did you handle this? Or what was the outcome of this? Or what would you do differently? These are things you have to ask yourself because you are now the teacher. You are the mentor. We can't, the schools are not going to teach this. They're not. They'll teach history, they'll teach American history, how Columbus found America and who the 21st president was, and what this president did and when this war happened, they're going to teach that. That's okay. But now it's up to you to teach about family heritage, family dynamics, because they're going to need it as they navigate this life. If you don't have a relationship with your father's or your baby's father's side of the family, I would encourage you to try to get in touch with them and start having discussions, ask questions, right? For the sake of the kids. You know, I would approach it as, you know what, you don't have to like me, but kids are involved. And I would just like to know a little bit about your family history, some of the challenges. And also not just the challenges, but some good things that come out of their family. You just never know what you'll learn, but you have to sit down and talk to them. You should also, if you have family reunions, participate. Yeah. If you can, if you can afford it, go to your family reunion. Take your kids, let them meet their cousins. And again, if you have brothers and sisters, they may be experiencing some of those same behaviors that you need to teach your children, right? And now you all can work together. Oh, imagine that. Working together to solve some of these issues or behaviors that have been encountered in the past. And now with today's technology, you could possibly overcome that just by researching it and coming back and developing a plan to address some of those issues. Yeah, imagine that. So, ladies, long story short, leave it up to the schools to teach American history, culture. But you as a mom take on teaching heritage, it's gonna pay off in the end. Some things are gonna make sense versus assuming, okay, I'm not sure why you're behaving this way, but this is what I'm gonna do to correct it. But if you know that this is something that comes along with family generations, you're gonna approach it differently. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, tell another single mom. This is the mom to mentor podcast where it's designed to encourage, motivate, and guess what? Educate because we're more than nurturers, we're more than providers. So, ladies, I would ask you to step up your game, step it up, take the challenge and say, you know what? I'm gonna teach my child or children about heritage and what it means and why it's important. All right, again, if you enjoyed today's episode, tell another single mom. Next week, I'll probably be talking about disappointment and educating our children about disappointment, why is that important? Because they're gonna experience a lot of it through this life, and even you. So come back, come back, you gotta come back, and here next week's episode as I talk about disappointment, how to address it, and how to cultivate teaching it, and what some of the expected outcomes will be. All right, have a great day.