How do I help my child set goals?

Hello, my name is Ron Blue, and I’m asked a lot of times this question about goals: “How do you help your children set goals?” Because, kids don’t typically start, on their own, thinking about goals. I do not think you sit an 8 year old down and say, “Now we are going to go through some goal setting.” I think that more is learned, or more is “caught” than what is taught. So, to be taught to children, goal setting has to begin with me as a parent. Is it a part of my process of financial decision-making? Do I set goals? Do I think out 3, 5 or 10 years into the future and try to answer financial questions? If it’s not a part of my life, I really don’t have anything to pass on to my children. So it begins with me.

As our children grew up, what we did was we talked a lot about goals. We never said to our kids, “Thou shalt set goals. You have to set goals.” We kind of made it a process of life, because we set goals. We talked about what we wanted to do in the future. But one of the most practical things that I think that we did with our children, and one of the most fun things also as a parent was this: we had 5 children, and on their birthday, we would take that child out for dinner alone. It was their birthday dinner. And we got in the habit, which we followed pretty well, of having a notebook for each of our children, where we would ask them some questions about their goals. We would say, “What would you like to do over the next year? What grades would you like to get, what friends would you like to make, what activities would you like to be involved in, what clothes, maybe, do you want to buy?”… all of these things that are future oriented. And we wrote them down in a notebook, and frankly we never went back to them after that dinner. But a year later we would then go back to, and look at, what the goals were a year ago. What we were trying to communicate was the process, not the result. It has been really fun for us to think back on those goal-setting dinners, those birthday dinners with our children.

That is a practical thing to do with your children. But if you don’t set goals yourself, then you can’t really expect your children to do something that you’re not practicing. You can’t preach it and not practice it. If you are going to preach it, you have got to practice it.

Click here for the June 19, 2009 Blog Entry