I’ve posted about this before but I am truly begging you, if you haven’t already, today is the day to start recording stories with hidden wisdom for your child to listen to.
I do this with my child’s Yoto player, but you can do it with a Yoto, a Tonie, an Mp3 player, you could record it on cassette tape for all I care, but I just want you to try it.
Think of a topic, a life skill, a pain point, a thing you really need to talk about but don’t know how, and tell a story about it.
The time you failed a test and didn’t know how to handle it.
Maybe it’s the time you dated someone longer than you should have and there were signs you weren’t right for each other (or they weren’t safe).
Or the time you said something you know you shouldn’t have, felt super embarrassed, and didn’t know how to handle it.
It could be the time you thought your crush was waving at you but they were actually waving at the person behind you and you wanted to crawl in a trash can and never come out.
Perhaps you tell the story of the time you did something your parents told you not to, it went badly, and then you were scared if you told them and asked for help they’d be mad at you.
Even the story of when you first went to sleep away camp and felt homesick for the first time.
Open a voice note, pick a topic, and start talking. You can screw up, you can say “um” and “like” as much as you need to, but describe how you felt, what you thought, what you learned at the time and what you know now. If the story didn’t go well in reality and you want it to be a cautionary tale, maybe throw in what you know now and how it would go differently for your kiddo with a supportive adult like you in their lives, or how you would handle it if they came to you in this situation.
Our kids know we aren’t perfect (and they find ways of making that clear) but when it comes to big life skills like risk assessment or asking for help, we have it all figured out from their perspective. They need to see us model the messiness, the making mistakes, and the learning from consequences.
And if we make it clear that we’re willing to talk about how WE dealt with these tough topics, we’ve done something super important- we’ve started the conversation. But because our kids are listening to it on their own (possibly) there’s no pressure on how the conversation has to go.
Then, if our kids or teens are facing one of these topics, they may already have an idea of how we talk about it, and they know they can come to us and continue the conversation because we’ve already started it.
*Bonus: I recently discovered stories my grandparents had written about their lives at the beginning of the 20th century (my family has . I read their stories out loud so those histories can live on, and it’s been such a great way of sharing family history with my child.*
