While you are focusing on your child’s marvellous mark sheet and anticipating numbers approaching the three-digit mark, there are certainly other things you need to teach your child from a very young age to make them a good, empathetic, and responsible human being.

These are the kind of things that nobody could teach anybody, except for life. These are the kind of things that defines a person more than a CV, resume, or marks sheet can define them. These are the things that also help a person find a purpose in their life, and live for a better world. These are the things that can only provide the truest form of happiness. These are the things that make life worth living, and helps in sustaining harmony. These things strengthen your belief system, builds your faith, notice the good things about life, and focus on what is right. These are the things that get noticed as the first thing about a person.

Are you curious about what these things are? These are the simplest and basic things in life.

1.     Co-Dependency

Teach them how everything is co-dependent on each other on the planet. Tell them about the co-dependency in your family, for example. Make them figure out who is responsible for what. Make sure you leave no one because honestly, everybody around you is helping you in some or the other manner. It will be an exercise for you as well to find out what positive effects does anybody and everybody has over you. Maybe somebody is helping you to detect lies by lying to you very often and making it a game for you to figure it out. Maybe somebody’s presence itself leaves a calming effect on your mind. Maybe somebody is teaching you patience or how to set your priorities in life and focusing on them. Therefore, actually, nobody is useless in a true sense.  

2.     Gratitude

Teach them to be thankful to anybody who has ever helped them in any way. Ask them to write gratitude messages to whoever has ever helped them, made them feel better, forgiven them despite their faults, motivated or inspired them, given them something they needed, or a gift, etc. They need not send these messages. Also, ask them to say “thank you” whenever somebody is giving them anything.

3.     Environment

Talking about gratitude, tell them how grateful they should be for the sunlight, trees, wind, rivers, mountains, rains, grass, sand, etc. and about what they offer us and what we have been offering them. Tell them what we could do at the least. Help them understand how the environment has been rapidly changing for the past few years. Make them connect with nature, to feel the sunlight in the palm of their hand, run barefoot on sand and grass, cherish rivers, drench in rain, sit under a tree’s shade, and breathe deeply. Nature heals and makes us strong on levels unimaginable. Develop in them the concern for the environment and go eco-friendly with them. Analyze with them how even a single action from our side affects our environment.

4.     Ecological System

Tell them about the ecological system. Sure, they must be learning it in their textbooks. But here, what they learn from their parents, siblings, and friends matter more. It stays in their mind. It makes them remain considerate of it and leaves a lasting effect in their conscience. You might not like animals because maybe you are afraid of them. You can tell them to be careful around other organisms, but try not to pass on your fear to them. Don’t make them hate the other organisms because their existence is actually helping us in sustaining our life on the planet.

5.     Empathy

Help them to develop empathy towards every living thing on the planet. Because you would agree, that life is the most beautiful thing that exists; life in you, life in your family, life in your kids. When we extend our heart with empathy and understanding to other living beings, it is a way of acknowledging God’s presence, or the presence of a higher being, a force much bigger and greater than our awareness of it. Praying to God is useless if you don’t develop empathy and acceptance towards everything that God has created.

Teaching these things to your child will not only make them a better human being but will also help them build a real home for themselves on this planet — a home of harmony, a home of love, a home of acceptance.