My children have good memories of chore time. In fact, so do I. I believe there are two main reasons why.

I cannot emphasize enough that if you want your children to have a good attitude about something, you have to have one first. If you drag your feet and complain about your responsibilities, they are very likely to do so as well. Parents have the opportunity to deeply influence their children’s attitude toward any kind of work, and this includes household chores.

Having a good attitude is not limited to just being cheerful. It also means examining why there are chores. There are chores because of life and people. The more life and people in a home, the more chores there will be. Chores are evidence of having enough clothes and food. Chores are often evidence that people did things together. While it is true on one hand that some chores are due to things getting broken and dirty, it is also true that some chores are simply a product of creativity. Chore does not have to be a dirty word!

If you want to teach your child to play a musical instrument, you don’t approach them with apologies and a solemn face. You don’t emphasize how tedious long hours of practice will be. You don’t look sorrowful while you explain how you wish you had never learned to play the piano or guitar. Not if you are smart.

It makes more sense to tell a child how you made practice fun and how being able to make music has enhanced your enjoyment of life. You can do the same thing with chores. Help your children understand how doing and keeping up with chores makes life more enjoyable. Show them how to whistle while they work. Draw them into this nitty-gritty part of family life as another way to partake of one another’s company.

A good chore system will

Lets flesh those ideas out.

What are your goals with chore time? Mine were

But the children needed different sorts of goals. They needed

The wrong approach to sharing can strain a parent-child relationship. The definition of share, whether a noun or a verb, implies both ownership and voluntary action. Understanding ownership rights for children still under the guardianship of parents is crucial to understanding sharing in the home, so I recommend my recent post Guidelines for Children’s Property Rights in the Home.

Here are 5 common distortions of sharing:

Let’s look at these prevalent claims one at a time, keeping in mind that there will be some overlap.

Deciding with whom and when to share something is a multifaceted decision. I suppose that if both parties have good attitudes and motives in the transaction, then, maybe it is almost always nice to share. What makes this statement obviously lacking is asking the question, “How much sharing is enough?”

If sharing is always the nice thing to do, then does it have to be equal? Would it be better to just give the other person everything you have? Or maybe you think that sharing a certain thing would be bad for that person or not allow you to use the thing in a better way.

The owner of something should not be limited to what is currently judged “nice” by non-owners. Even if there is no concrete plan to use the resources in another way, an owner of something should feel free to refrain from sharing even if the only reason is saving for later possibilities. Doing so does not make him a non-nice person, especially if there is no life-altering need by someone else.

This could more accurately be called begging. Children should be taught that such requests should be limited to times of extreme need or as part of very close relationships. They should not ask except under those special circumstances, and they should be wary of people who feel free to ask for things.

Of course, parents usually have the kind of relationships with their children that makes children feel free to ask. Parents do their children a disservice by sharing whenever a child asks. By doing so, they miss opportunities to help their children feel comfortable saying no to others who try to guilt them into sharing.

For instance, I have known parents who felt they had to sneak into a bathroom to eat their own food or special treat. This should not be so. A child can learn that sometim

You can avoid the stereotypical musical clash between generations. This is important because music is an important mode of expression and an integral part of social interaction. Here are basic strategies:

You don’t have to be musical to enjoy music with your children. In fact, you should help your children to understand that engaging with music is not something restricted to the highly talented or famous. Young children automatically like and interact with music. This can be a wonderfully fun and useful part of your parent-child relationship.

There are many ways to integrate music into family life.

Just participating in musical activities increases musical abilities and understanding. This leads to both increased enjoyment with personal participation and increased appreciation for other people’s music. By encouraging children to engage with music, you encourage them to be creative.

Music is repetitive by nature. The structure of music is one of patterns and repetition. This helps with memorization and enjoyment. The more familiar we are with a song, the more we can “get into it.” This can provide both opportunity and challenge.

One important thing to remember is that we can often teach our brains to NOT pay attention to continuous noises around us. By practicing patience, mixed with understanding the benefits of repetition to the child, it can help us gain a perspective that makes it easier to subdue irritation.

Sometimes it is just a matter of volume. Asking children to turn down the volume or play their instruments a bit softer is a reasonable social thing for them to be aware of. For young

If you think it is normal for children to disregard parental concerns about friendships, I have some good news for you. A whole lot depends on the groundwork of trust you have built, combined with some strategies for keeping the subject of friends open. If you take the time to interact in a way that is meaningful and honest with your child, he or she will almost certainly look to you for your support and wisdom.

I’ve discussed how to give your child reasons to respect and trust you in previous articles of this series, beginning with How Your Attitude Toward Other People Affects Your Child. Another crucial factor is time and schedule. It takes enough margin in your life for important conversations to happen often enough and in a relaxed way for the relationship to grow.

It’s kind of like eating. If you only eat a minimal meal every few days, you will be malnourished and calorie deprived, although possibly still barely alive. If you are always stuffing your food down in a hurry, you will probably get severe indigestion and be cranky.

It can be tempting to add all kinds of activities to a child’s schedule thinking it is good, only to find that the parent-child relationship is being starved as a result. Even with the full schedule, the child will feel a lack of relationship and try to fill the void one way or another. This does not mean the child did not want relationship with the parent, but only that it was not available.

Your goal as a parent should be to be very, very available for relationship. With this relationship, it will be normal for the child to actually ask the parent for friendship advice. The child will also be much more receptive to suggestions about friendships.

With the foundation for communication and relationship in place, there are also some specific strategies for guiding a child in his friendships. This can begin at a young age.

My college-age daughters (33 and 36 years younger than me) frequently borrow my clothes. They often wear the clothes that I have purchased for them as gifts and receive lots of compliments. It’s not that I am a fashion pro, by any means. However, I am not afraid to be creative or take fashion risks. I have learned that appearing confident is at least half the battle. I have tried to pass this on to my children.

This doesn’t mean I don’t care what other people think. I can be insecure, but I have gotten fairly good at suppressing those concerns in favor of other priorities, including fun and comfort. I have examined the culture of clothing and worked on finding a balance between not totally shocking people, but not trying to fit in a mold that doesn’t fit me and is always changing.

Passing on this same perspective to my children has resulted in less conflict between us about how they choose to dress. They know that I am concerned about three things:

How much a parent might interfere based on these criteria will obviously depend on how old the child is. The younger a child is, the less aware he is aware of potential consequences. Weather or environmental considerations can be pretty serious.

Concerns about reactions will vary with the context. For instance, I really don’t care what people think about what we wear to Walmart, but if we are going to someone’s home I would recommend we consider their preferences.

And while I often feel no need to adhere to other people’s (wide variety of) ideas about the morality of certain dress codes, neither am I going to dress with the main goal of bothering someone.

I think that a lot of tension between children and parents regarding clothing occurs because of the factors below. Some are the prerogative of the parents due to finances or work load.  Some are blown out of proportion, often due to peer pressure on both sides.

Washing, repairing, and household order has a lot to do with property rights, so I think my article suggesting some Gui

Where do you get your ideas of education from? Have you given much thought to the government dictates and cultural expectations? You need to consider just how much these ideas and approaches impact not only your relationship with your child, but also your child’s ability to think for himself or herself. (Once in a while I specify both genders, but most of the time I use the grammatically inclusive ‘he’ and ‘him’ versions.)

Here are the basics you need to be thinking about:

If you haven’t really examined these basics, then you are flying blind or letting someone else fly while you don’t even watch.

We could probably all agree that education has something to do with learning. Synonyms of education listed in my Webster’s dictionary include instruction, schooling, teaching, training, and tutelage. While the noun school is typically thought of as a special place for learning or a group of people with a common set of beliefs, it was originally an intermission.

Both the Greek skhole and the Latin schola are specifically referring to having leisure from work to discuss. The idea of attending school, as particularly used in English, isn’t recorded until the 1300’s. Why is this good to know? Because then we can begin to separate the idea of learning from the modern day institutional, non-family settings.

Leisure for discussion is about as far removed from the modern, test-oriented school model as you can get. Leisure also implies that there is already interest, or else why spend your free time talking about it?

I expect that children were being taught things and learning, but the point is that the current way of teaching children is not based on some timeless model of learning. It will probably also occur to someone that in previous time periods (and still in a few outlying cultures today), that survival was more of an issue and children didn’t have the same opportunity for free time. Isn’t it ironic, then, that as soon as they do get some significant free time, some adults think the children need to be locked up in buildings, away from home, for most daylight hours to work on a pre-approved education?

Still, I think we could say that the definition of education is two-fold.

This title is kind of tongue-in-cheek, but kind of not. We can make choices that affect our children’s sleeping habits. We can also, after a certain age, expect them to begin to respect limits. But it is a well known fact that young children are associated with parental sleep deprivation.

How sleep is handled can have a big impact on parent-child relationship due to a few things.

Let’s talk about it from 3 perspectives:

You have probably heard some of this advice about bedtime:

The goal is to have bedtime be a combination of good memory making and relationship building. You want to look forward to these times with your kids. You want them to feel sleeping is the next and natural step in the process. You want them to be convinced that you like spending time with them. You want them to feel secure in falling asleep.

An important question to ask is

Is it the child’s fault that the parent is sleep deprived?

In some cases, the answer is quite obviously yes. Babies in particular need round-the-clock care at intervals that unavoidably interrupt sleep. If all a parent does is take care of the baby and snatch some shut eye when the baby does, it can still be very hard to feel rested.

Fortunately, this doesn’t last forever. The baby grows and reaches an age when his or her body can go longer without eating and has gotten more used to normal daily rhyth

If you want to discuss children’s property rights, you need to understand two basic things:

How you engage with your children regarding their property rights in the home will have a big impact on your relationship with them. As a parent you have learn to exercise your position of responsibility while still respecting your children as individuals.

Broadly speaking, property is something that someone has legitimate control over. Someone may be an individual or a group of two or more. Controlling means having legal rights to use, rent, or sell the property. I speak in terms of natural law more than governmental law, although illegitimate force is too often used to usurp true property rights. However, that is a subject for another time.

Almost everyone agrees we all own our own bodies. At least everyone thinks they own their own body, whether or not they want to argue about someone else’s bodily rights. No one else can use their brain to tell your mouth to speak or your legs to walk. They may coerce you, but they do not have ultimate control. It is a nicely built in feature that makes self-ownership as obvious as the nose on your face.

Everyone also has objects they call their own. From clothes to houses, it is obvious that everyone claims some things as their’s. One way or another, someone has priority, preference, decision making control over certain objects.

Everyone claims some sort of space as their’s, to one extent or another. Even in prison camps, there are many stories of guards not venturing in areas due to lice or potential violence. Certain areas are claimed by the prisoners.

Consider the common question, “Is this chair yours?” while in a restaurant? Even in a temporary and/or rented scenario, we acknowledge that being somewhere and using that space gives us a temporary right of ownership. If we bring our own chair, it gives us more ownership rights, even on someone else’s land. If we own the land, we are within our rights to ask someone to leave, but we never own their body or their things even if they are on our property.

There are some things on earth that it seems harder to establish ownership of, such as air or water. However, the fact that those with governmental power jealously guard those very things from citizens and other governmental powers suggests this is not so far fetched after all. If governmental groups can discuss such boundaries amongst themselves, then surely the rest of us are capable of working out these boundaries privately.

There are situations where p

At what point should we teach our children about death? And how should we go about it? These are questions that cannot be avoided. From the time a child is old enough to squish a bug or hug a grandparent, death is destined to be part of their lives. It is not really a matter of IF we should talk to them about it, but what we will say.

Obviously, it is going to be hard to talk about death honestly if we have not grappled with the subject personally. If we try to pretend that death is not an unavoidable part of life, we will not be prepared to realistically talk to our children about it on any level. And our children need us to be able to offer insight. If we don’t, they will look for answers in other places.

Death makes us ask questions about the meaning of life. It makes us face whether or not we have any hope in living. It confronts us with our finite time on this earth and our inability to control the most predictable and universal outcome that humans share. If we cannot help our children understand and be prepared for death, whether theirs or someone else’s, we have missed an opportunity to touch the depth of their soul.

I suggest these strategies for helping your child understand death:

Children usually know when they are being treated like they are stupid or being given thoughtless answers. By thoughtless, I don’t mean that you don’t care about your children. What I mean is answers that are without substance in meaning, that are given to avoid the discussion or that are sound nice without really answering questions.

Telling your children one-liners like “he will always be here with us” or “I will always watch over you” are vague. Without addressing real concerns, these answers are likely to leave children confused and unequipped to deal with real grief when it happens.

I know from personal experience with our children that even a 4 year old can be hit hard by grief. And even a 4 year old can benefit greatly from already having a basic understanding of life and death, hope and meaning. Without these things, it is hard to give the firm comfort that a child may well need.

One of peculiar benefits of pets is that they have shorter life spans than people. A pet’s death can be a controlled emotional crisis that gives children insight into life. Even with minimal emotional attachment, such as in the death of a goldfish or anything that doesn’t obviously respo

If you had all the money you wanted, would it make your relationship with your child better or worse? That is, of course, a trick question. It is not how much money you have that makes a difference, but how you handle your financial affairs that matters.

It is the LOVE of money, not the money itself which is the issue. I would rephrase that to say the love of your financial image. I have seen people be just as arrogant about their state of poverty as Scrooge is about his pile of money.

Your children are subconsciously observing your attitude toward money from a young age. They see:

Soon enough, they are trying to figure out how they can access money, because it is an important step to independence. What you need to teach them is that it is not about how much money you have, it is about how you manage what money you have. This is a lesson that will affect all their relationships and prosperity for the rest of their lives.

Money is a tool. It is not a necessary tool, although it is very convenient. It is a way for people to cooperate with each other. It is simply a tool. Some people use it well, but others use it poorly.

Money is like fire. It can stoke the engine or it can burn the building down. It all depends on how it is handled. But we have an advantage with money that we don’t have with fire. Money will only get out of control if the person uses it in an out of control way. There are no natural physical forces that will make money destructive. Its destructiveness or usefulness is completely dependent on its owner.

Money cannot exist without an owner. It is only money when it is being used between people to make an exchange. Money as money can only have value if the people exchanging it agree to that value.

Money works for people, whether they understand it or not! If you want a good introduction to how money came into existence or how it works, then I recommend Honest Money by Gary North. But you don’t have to have a detailed historical and economic understanding of money to talk about it the right way.

Your children will benefit in many ways from hearing you talk about money much like you would talk about the family schedule. How can you make it work for you and your family, applying