Hey friends, welcome back! I am solo again on the podcast. I hope you enjoyed a few weeks of important conversations about parenting and entrepreneurship, homemaking and marriage, and doing it all with, of course, passion! The last three episodes were more lifestyle conversations, real and raw conversations with my husband, and then two good friends. We covered several topics but some overlapped, so if you didn’t get a chance to listen to those you should definitely check them out. I’m excited to hopefully hear from all of those guests again someday on the podcast and hear from others.
So today’s topic is so dear to my heart (which I honestly say every episode), but truly, this topic feels so near because I am a mama of littles who are watching me and my husband in everything we do. A quote I heard several years back, maybe even before becoming a mom, that I think about often is: Children are great imitators, so give them someone great to imitate.
I don’t know who said it, so I cannot accurately quote it, but I definitely did not come up with those words, although I know them to be true.
My husband and I are in the stage of teaching everything to our kids in great depth so they have a good understanding. We’re in the stage of being asked “why” several times an hour. We’re in the stage of diaper changes while teaching our four-year-old how to read and write. And within this life stage one of my favorite things is to dream about the character I want my littles to someday have and how my husband and I can begin to instill & build up these characteristics starting now in the lives and hearts and minds of our children.
Here are a few things we do in the Ramsey house to help instill good character, specifically ones that produce passion, in our young kids:
- We read the bible and pray with our kids daily
- Learn ways our kids relate to God.
- We tell our kids what breaks our hearts, we pray for those things and people and serve people when we can
- Observe what makes my kids cry in order to help them embody empathy
- Learn what our kids are good at
If you have older kids who will understand the thought process, ask them this set of questions, have them answer them for themselves in this present stage they’re in (not their future self):
- Who does God say that I am? What is his greatest commandment for my life?
- What are some characteristics of Jesus that I, too, can embody?
- Do I know my purpose?
- To whom can my purpose be shown to?
- What am I good at? What skills do I have?
- How can my purpose work alongside my skills?
Doing this once will have an impact, but asking your kids these questions multiple times a year would have an even bigger impact on their hearts and minds, on their view of Jesus, on their future.
I think we, as parents, can easily get tangled up in the desire to instill our passions in our kids instead of simply instilling passion itself. It’s the typical story of the dad wanting his kids to love and play football because he played football. But that isn’t guiding or
We can’t forget that passion is rooted in being willing to bear with someone else, so the greatest way we can instill passion in the next generation is through the practice of serving and teaching our kids that life isn’t about them.
Going back to where I started: kids are great imitators, so give them someone great to imitate.
We all have the greatest person to imitate: Jesus. He walked this earth, he is our model for everything. He said that he came not to be served but to serve. We need to model this as well and that begins in our home.
If we do as Jesus did, which is harder than words on paper, our kids will notice. And not only will our kids notice, but others will too. Our neighbors will notice, our kids’ teachers will notice, strangers will indeed notice.
In our home we make it a point to do these specific things on a daily, weekly and monthly basis like Jesus did. We:
- Pray (and not just before meals or when we need something), but throughout our day
- Sing praises and dance
- Read the bible and other books that teach us how to produce good fruit in our lives
- Serve others: making meals, doing yard work, with a non-profit
- Observe and remember the Sabbath
Things that Jesus didn’t necessarily do (some he did), but we do because of the context of the time period we live in, we:
- Turn off our phones once a week
- Get off social media once a week, one week a month and sometimes several months at a time
- Eat nourishing foods
- Move our bodies often
- Enjoy time in nature
After I wrote most of this episode I asked Alexander how he instills good character and passion in our kids and it was so sweet, he literally said reading the Bible, praying with our kids, discipline and modeling. He reminded me of this quote his grandpa often said and his mom says it too, it goes something like: whenever you can do something, and when necessary, use words.
Instilling passion in our kids and in the next generation begins with knowing Jesus, modeling what he did, and building up good character.
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