How do we teach our kids about setting goals and expectations?
How do we make sure they understand the planning needed to achieve them?
More importantly, do they know how to set themselves up for success with challenging, yet realistic goals?
It’s a challenging concept, not so much to understand, but to execute on. And unfortunately, it is not something that is technically taught in school. We as parents need to make sure goal setting becomes a familiar concept to them. Whether it is small and playful goals during their early years, or bigger, more complex goals, teaching them a good approach to go about achieving their goals is essential for their success as human beings.
Because parents always want to find entertaining/enjoyable ways to teach our children valuable lessons, our team at Ewotopia did a little research and found 5 fun and entertaining methods to teach our kids about goals.
Let’s dig in.
1 – Make a family bucket list
Just like we, young or wise adults, have certain dreams and goals we want to accomplish in our lives, our children should too! Of course, the type of goal and magnitude will greatly differ, but they are goals nonetheless. Make it a family activity. Take out a piece of paper, brainstorm together, and come up with a list of accomplishments, experiences, and achievements – aka goals.
After these goals have been set, go over them. Which one can you achieve first? How? Go about the list with this thinking and come up with a plan and timeline to achieve each goal. Our children should be part of the process as well. We want them to learn how it’s not enough just to want something, but to also think how we are going to work to achieve it.
Some potential categories for family bucket list items that can get everyone motivated and engaged are: Local Activity: what fun activity do you have in common? Do you need to prepare for it? Do you need to save some money for it? Other item ideas can be a family trip, sports, wellness?
Set timelines and deadlines. Review the bucket list every once in a while to see if you have accomplished what you set the family to do.
2 – Draw a Wheel of Fortune
It’s important to come up with our own list of goals we want to achieve, but what if we can leave some of it to luck?
This is a super fun way to come up with new goals. You can use it at any moment and be totally random about it. This works best with non-urgent or priority goals that are generally more personal or spontaneous and adventurous.
Draw a wheel divided into segments, just like a pizza with slices, and name each segment with a category. For example, you can create categories like friends, family, sports, etc. Anything that may be relevant in our children’s life.
Before we roll the dice, our kids should start thinking about a goal for each category they would like to achieve within a set period of time. Then roll the dice! What did you get? What is the goal associated to that category? Let’s go get them!
3 – Play Sports
This one should not come as a surprise. Sports can be a great way to teach our children about a lot of principles and life lessons, including goal setting!
Our recommendation is to NOT stick to just winning as the major goal, but rather treat each little objective as its own goal and measure. Sports or other hobbies usually include a “winner” for better performance, but life goals are not binary, you don’t just ‘lose’ or ‘win’. A person’s goal and factor by which to measure one’s own achievement is IMPROVEMENT. Focus on improving yourself every day in each aspect of importance and don’t compare to others.
Does your kid need to learn how to bounce the ball while running? GOAL!
Does he/she need to learn how to shoot 3-pointers? GOAL!
Does he/she need to learn how to pitch the ball? Kick the ball? Serve the ball? GOALS, GOALS, GOALS!!!
If any of our kids have just a little area where they need to improve, make this a goal: their purpose. And for that, also create a timeline and an approach on how to achieve it. How much do they need to practice? What days of the week? How are you going to measure improvement? All these little things will teach our children about goal setting and achievement. Rather than just teaching them about winning a game, we are teaching them how to develop themselves and become better. And the best part is, they are having fun while at it!!
4 – Make New Year Resolutions
This works similar to creating a bucket list, but in a narrower period of time.
Every year, sit down with your kids and ask them what they want to achieve in the upcoming year. Our hopes are that each year their goals relate to their stages in life. This is why it is different to the bucket list. These are relatively short term goals that will help them develop little by little into the person they want to become.
Once they have realized what they want to achieve, come up with a plan with time and deadlines for each item on the list. The best thing we can do as parents is to hold serious accountability and support on this plan. This is for them to know that somebody else is expecting them to achieve these goals. As a family, each member should not only be working on their own goals, but also be supporting and thinking of ways to help other members achieve their goals. Be careful not to enforce the plan, but to support it. Ask them questions throughout the year about how they are doing. If the answer seems a little negative, offer more active and deeper help. Help them realize what they wrote down may not truly be their top-most priority goal, and hence why their actions are not congruent. If they are focusing more on something else, then it would make more sense to shift attention to that aspect and set goals there. The point is to support each others true and pressing goals, not judge on what the actual goal is.
The goal is to achieve these goals together.
5 – Create a vision board
Last but not least, our children, just like a majority of humans, are probably a visual being. What this means is that it is easier for many to imagine things if we can visually see them, or at least something similar. So let’s get creative!
Take out a bunch of old magazines and ask the kids to cut out pictures and images that represent their hopes and dreams. Paste all of these pictures on a board and decorate with colors, emphasizing what’s more important.
Once the vision board is done, let’s make sure our children can describe what each picture represents and how they plan to achieve those dreams. It might be little simple things like play a game with their friends, or something big like going to another country. Whatever it is, we need to be understanding and open, but also make sure we don’t over-promise. We don’t want this activity to become a source of a future disappointment.
We fully support the “everything is possible” approach, where we teach our children that they can achieve anything they want if they work hard for it. However, kids need to learn about how ‘realistic’ these goals are at the moment, and if these are dreams for the long term, make sure they understand that as well. It is important to understand the real limits that time and resources impose on us. Although we can achieve great things through hard work, it is very difficult to achieve MANY great things simultaneously. Each day brings us a set number of limited hours we can direct our focus and efforts to. Depending on the type of goal we may also have other resource limits such as money or people’s help. Understanding this, we should teach our children to narrow down and prioritize to what brings most happiness and self-fulfillment.
Let’s wrap it up!
Goals are an essential part of life. Every individual should learn how to set goals and come up with an approach to achieve them. Whether the goals are big or small, they should be treated the same. They are all important and they will all teach us something about ourselves and how we do things. Hopefully, this process will help us parents teach our children be better goal setters with time.
It is due to the high importance of goal settings effect on life achievements, that we should teach our children since their early childhood. But of course, we always want to make it fun for them, right? Judy Willis conducted a neuroscience research that explains how the chance to learn and retain information is higher when the environment and topic “are enjoyable and relevant to students’ lives, interests, and experiences.” In other words, rather than making something a task they will not enjoy, we need to find ways that relate to their everyday experiences while also teaching them about goals and other important lessons.
In this article, we shared 5 fun and entertaining ways to teach them about goals in the hopes our kids can learn about the importance of setting goals in a way they enjoy and will remember. Using things and games like family bucket lists, a wheel of fortune, sport activities, new year resolutions, and vision boards can all be very interactive and enjoyable methods to teach them this concept.
We hope you give these a try and let us know how they turnout.
Resources
Willis, July. “The Neuroscience of Joyful Education.” Educational Leadership. 2007. https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/4141/the-neuroscience-joyful-education-judy-willis-md.pdf
Cullins, Ashley. “5 Fun Goal Setting Activities for Children.” December 29, 2017. https://biglifejournal.com/blogs/blog/5-fun-goal-setting-activities-children