“It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.”
My son spoke this sentence today. We were stuck with the car in an icy ditch. Foolishly, I had tried to reverse uphill on a crust of compacted snow and rain. There was a lot for me to learn here (and model too!).
He’s heard me speak that exact sentence a dozen if not hundreds of times in his little life. It’s a one-liner we often use in our family.
You’ll have some one-liners yourself, I’m sure. Take a moment to think about a few. What do you say again and again in certain situations?
Here are a few common ones: “Practice makes perfect”; “Don’t cry over spilled milk”; “Easy come, easy go.”
You may or may not agree with these. Perhaps they underscore values that are different from yours. But whatever you consider an essential teaching for your child, make sure you can boil it down to a single sentence. With a handful of one-liners, you can then drip-feed your core family teachings throughout childhood.
Redundancy emphasizes importance.