Keep your word so she can keep hers
My mom had given me one of her tried and true recipes for me to replicate at home. It happened to be one of my daughter’s favorites, too. We went to the groceries store and got everything we needed—except we forgot one thing. By that time, we were all settled at home, it was dark, it was cold and the store was probably closed. We were both disappointed when we had to defer our culinary exploration to the next day. Another time, I had googled a dahl recipe that was easy enough to try. I printed it and took it to an Indian grocer. I walked into the store and stared at the list, then the shelves and back at the list not knowing where to begin. Eventually, I was rescued by a cashier. She asked me to hand her the list, looked at it and then said to me, “There’s an easier recipe than this. I’ll get what you need. Stay here.” I was mildly embarrassed but mostly relieved I got help. And just recently, my daughter flipped through a dessert book and wanted to make mint squares on graham crust with a chocolate top layer. It looked good, but there were three layers to prepare! That’s tripled the work! She asked if I can go and get all the ingredients so we can make it the next time she’s back with me. She asked me every day when she was at her mom’s to find out if I had gone to the grocery store. In the end, mom’s recipe was made. The dahl turned out better than I had expected and my daughter got to make her midnight mint squares which took so long, we ate it nearly at midnight!
Why am I telling you all of this? Because my daughter’s love for cooking requires effort from me to get the ingredients before she can get started. Cooking isn’t like building Legos—you need to have everything on hand before you start and you can’t do half and leave the rest for another day. So my daughter is quite keenly aware to make sure I do my part before she can begin hers.
As with any lesson to teach a child, modeling the behavior is likely the most effective approach. Since children love to emulate, when they see you do it, they will likely do what you do. And therefore teaching children to keep their words can be as simple as you keeping yours.
If you keep yours, she’ll learn the importance of keeping hers and eventually she’ll hold others to theirs. Best thing you could to is to treat her like an adult, consequences and all.
It goes both ways too. I make her take responsibility for things and hold her to it. One day, she wanted to walk to the nearby library by herself. I gave her a book I had finished and asked her to drop it off. If she didn’t, I’d be fined for its lateness. I also hold her responsible for her own tasks, too. At the beginning of every weekend she’s with me, I always ask her to take an inventory of what she needed to finish for school and extracurricular to prepare for Monday. Then I would ask her to set aside time to finish her homework and cello practice. She procrastinates, so I have to stay on top of her to ensure she does it. And when I do remind her, she doesn’t feel like I am nagging at her because these were commitments she had agreed to. In the end, she does it because she knows the disappointment she’ll bring to herself (not to me) if she shows up to school with incomplete homework or has a lousy cello class because the rest of the orchestra has to wait for her to shore up the bass. In a sense, I treat her like I would an adult, consequences and all.
A person’s word is their bond; their word is their trust. If there is no follow-through and no accountability, then what is the purpose of those words? Instilling this basic principle is best done by example. Teach your daughter that words must be dependable. But if you keep yours, she’ll learn the importance of keeping hers and eventually she’ll hold others to theirs. It’s a simple rule yet not everyone will do it. She will be disappointed in others but it changes nothing. She plays by her rules, it’ll be up to the others to live up to them.