Last year, we tried to prepare you for another great year of raising amazing kids with parenting resolutions for 2016 that encouraged better listening, more thoughtful meal planning, mindfulness and kindness towards our children.
We also shared the best character traits parents could nurture in their children during the Chinese Year of the Monkey like encouraging a sharp wit, boundless enthusiasm and a happy-go-lucky spirit.
This year, we’re taking resolution-setting a step further and sharing actual resolutions that help your kids build character. We purposely skipped out on the New Year’s Eve and January 1 resolution hype this year because we want your family to focus on building character year round, not just the first month of the year.
In consideration of a young child’s time perspective, research shows that they understand proximate goals over long-term ones. It’s easier for little ones to keep short-term, achievable goals and stay accountable under daily, weekly and monthly deadlines, rather than yearly.
Plus, we know a lot of adults can’t even stick to a 365-day commitment, so we don’t expect your 3-year old to be successful with that kind of resolution either.
This year, we’re doing New Year’s resolutions Kiddie Academy-style with our first-ever Character Calendar committed to the development of the whole child with a focus on social and emotional skills.
This calendar offers mini-resolutions for children between 2-years old and 8-years old to learn things like self-reliance, compassion and even humor. In fact, we’ve planned out resolutions for your child to learn and master a new character trait every month this year.
Teaching values like responsibility and patience to children can be challenging because they are abstract ideas – to kids, they are merely concepts or notions.
Research in child development tells us that children are concrete thinkers – they learn best when they can touch and manipulate items. This is challenging to do when teaching values like loyalty and honesty because they can’t be played with or held.
So, our Character Calendar helps young kids understand these values by concentrating on specific actions they can take – resolutions – that illustrate the concept and keep them learning about their personality, character and values all year long.
How to Use Kiddie Academy’s 12-Month Character Calendar
This calendar comes with a year’s worth of resolutions spread out over the next 12 months with short and easy, weekly resolutions throughout the month to keep your kids on track.
Each month, here’s what you’ll get:
- we explain the overall character lesson
- we offer some notes to parents to assist as you go
- we include a list of vocabulary words you can review with your children
- we will highlight actual activities kids can do each week of the month to work on developing their understanding of that month’s characteristic
- we share a monthly planner of smaller, “to-do” items for the month, as well as some context with goals you can work toward, and reasons the characteristic is important in real-world situations…
You can also check back on the Family Essentials blog to read even more about how to teach your child each month’s character trait, as well as even more activities for practicing those values. Keep us posted with your progress using #CharacterCalendar on social media. See below for our January Character Calendar, all about teaching PATIENCE:
  
