Life is all about choices. Some choices are simple, others choices are more complex. As parent raising two girls in today’s times, my wife and I must choose to be very intentional in what we allow our girls to take in. Self-love is extremely important, and we want to instill this in our little ones as early as possible. Early on, we reinforced them to “love the skin they are in.” We try to show them examples in popular culture of Black girls and Black families including music, art and literature. For example, we are currently reading, “A B to Jay-Z” to Lennox, and Kaileigh is reading “B is for Black Girl.”
Here are a few highlights of some of the things we do as parents to boost our girls self-awareness, self-care and confidence.
Demonstrate Self-Care
We always strive to have simple candid conversations with our girls. We explain the reasons why and how certain decisions are made and check for understanding. Our intent to create an environment where our girls can learn to articulate their emotions and communicate with effectiveness.
Lately, Kaileigh has been expressing her creativity through various curly hair styles. With support from Mom, she is learning and developing her hair care routine. From the wash n go’s to deep conditioning and hair masques, Kaileigh is embracing the process of cultivating and maintaining her Curls.
Actively Reinforce Their Dreams
Meet your Kids where they are. Kaileigh loves making Slime so we launched her company, “Slime Inc.” by @kailswithkurls. Through this we’ve been teaching her basic financial principles of saving, reinvesting, and developing a business model, but more importantly as parents, we are actively engaged in reinforcing the belief that the are no limitations to anything she puts her mind to.
Eat Good Food
DINNER TIME IS SACRED TIME. Our typical week can get very hectic; to combat this, we’ve established dinner time as our sacred, family time with no interruptions. No phones, TVs, distractions… Just US. We listen, laugh, recall stories, get into debates and attach to one another, but most importantly we do it TOGETHER.
Laugh A Lot with Them
We love to get silly with our girls. We make a point to laugh as often as possible. We try to play some type of family game or have movie night at least once a week. Our current go to game is Uno Attack. For some reason, I ALWAYS get accused of hiding cards.
Ultimately, as parents, we have to be consistent in our efforts with our kids and continuously push them to love themselves in the skin they’re in and be positive influences for them. Comment below and let us know how you implement teaching your little ones self-love and confidence!
