Are You Teaching Your Children to Take Risks or to Play It Safe? | Episode 572

There is a teaching that is common among parents, and it is to be careful, play it safe, to do what it protects self.

But I want to challenge your thinking in that regard that Making a difference in this world takes risk.

And we must be training our children to take risks and to understand risks.

So I am not saying be dangerous.

Being dangerous or thoughtless or careless or irresponsible.

But to do things in life, we must take risks.

And we can unbeknowingly to ourselves with our children, train them to not take risks.

And so Dr. Tim Elmore has written a book.

He's been doing some teaching on leadership in teenagers and youngsters.

One of his recent books addresses the whole idea of how we can short circuit this process of maturity.

He says, we risk too little, rescue too early, and we rave too easily.

And it all starts with this idea of taking risk and that we risk too little and we train our children to play it safe, to be careful, to watch out.

And that language can cause them to be less adventurous in life.

We want our children to be adventurous, to be dreamers, to be ones who want to make a difference.

And it all starts with the idea of doing something that is uncertain.

And it can begin with little exercises, little things that you do.

Let's say that you find someone who has a lawnmower that is not working.

They are abandoning it.

You can get that and get your son a set of tools and say, can you take this down, take this apart to where no part is connected to another.

Just something like that.

They cannot break it because it's already broken.

But it begins the idea of I am going to solve a problem or I'm going to figure out how to take this thing apart.

And it starts one step after another.

But being willing to do something that has a bit of risk, You don't know exactly what you're doing, but you're going to do something anyway.

So start with something small, something with low risk, but it's not certain.