What Messages to Send

1. Sharing our own experiences and goals with our children, because children tend to adopt our ideals. They need to know how we feel about making an effort, working hard, and planning ahead.
   
   
2. Establishing realistic, consistent family rules for work around the house so our children can develop schedules and stable routines. Children need limits set even though they will test these limits over and over again. Children need to know what they can depend on—and they need to be able to depend on the rules we make.
   
   
3. Encouraging our children to think about the future. Our children need realistic, reasonable expectations, and they need the satisfaction of having some of these expectations met. They need to take part in making decisions (and to learn that sometimes this means sacrificing fun now for benefits later) and they need to find out what happens as a result of decisions they have made.

Throw a stone into a pool and the circles widen and overlap. None of us lives in isolation. The circles of home, community, and school overlap also. For our children to learn and thrive, they need the support and encouragement of all of the circles in which we live. But the circle in the center is the home and that's where it all starts.