The Missing Ingredient

When you think of your youth walking across the stage to receive their high school diploma, it's exciting that you get to check off the HS Grad box with a big check mark.

Your student must have met all the requirements every student must meet to obtain their high school diploma.

My question for all caring parents and guardians is, what other boxes can you confidently and truthfully check off?

Do you have a list of life and leadership skills you want to teach your tween or teen before they obtain their high school diploma, pursue further education, and live their adult lives?

Have you invested thought, time, and training to prepare to check off the other items on the list of life and leadership skills? Have you identified the missing ingredient(s)?

Remember, you have a window of seven years from ages 11-to 18.

The time to act is NOW.                        

Baking Rye Bread

Have you ever followed a recipe hoping to enjoy the delicious output promised, which should look like figure 1 but ended up with a flat hard bread shown in figure 2?

 Here's what happened.

We always look forward to baking Rye bread with Grandma every year during Christmas break, and much effort goes into the preparation. We take the recipe list, purchase ingredients, measure them out, and take them to grandma's house for baking. So much anticipation goes into it as we look forward to our fun time together. Lots of chit-chats and catching up as we mix and knead.

We leave it to rise and then bake, and afterward, we enjoy the delicious bread and share some loaves with friends. Only this year, our batch turned out different.

Grandma's batch turned out well like it usually does but not ours. We discovered later that even though the yeast we used had not expired, it was too old to raise or leaven the dough.

We combined the ingredients for the recipe as described but ended up with the unleavened bread output. It is almost stone-hard and tastes nothing like it's supposed to.

The way to avoid the "missing ingredient outcome" is to ensure, confirm, and certify that you got the right, unexpired active yeast, and other ingredients are complete.

In the same way, you don't want your youth to travel through their teenage years and graduate with an excellent high school diploma but missing essential skills. So why not plan to ensure you'll be able to check off the items on the list of life and leadership skills.

 "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." ~ George Santayana

The first place to start is to make a list of life and leadership skills we desire to teach our youth before they leave home after high school to go off to college and live their adult lives.

These items on our list will be specific to us based on our background, and as unique as each of our youth are, our list will also have similar items that are essential for every youth to learn.

Let's take time to create, update, and refine our list.

Let's add to our list what's current and relevant to the journey our youth are on today, so we are updated for the times our youth live in now and the future they have ahead of them.

We want to see our youth grow up and accomplish great things in and with their lives. And we certainly don't want them to make the same mistakes we did.

We want our hindsight to be their foresight.

So, I invite all parents and guardians of teens ages 11-18 to intentionally create and document in other to implement a rich legacy for the next generation.