Your child needs a Mentor

Traditional Mentor/Mentee relationships are most commonly found in the workplace or are related to our careers. However, having someone to look up to is important in childhood. Many children will identify fictional characters such as super heroes as their idols or mentors. This provides very little realistic value for them and can make the child feel extremely disempowered at the inability for them to see themselves in their hero.

A proper mentor serves a purpose in the child’s current life, not just for the sake of looking up to someone, but to help the child figure out, learn and be inspired by the achievements, behaviours and humanity of the individual identified as their mentor. The mentor must be a human being whom the child can relate to and follow.

Through the Wonderful Me, we have built in mentoring as a crucial element into the program. We believe it’s of the utmost importance that a child is able to consciously choose who they look up to. We can see the difference in mindset of a child who looks up to fictional super hero characters vs real life heroes who are not comical and unrealistic.

Through our work and experience, these are the areas children identify as areas they want mentoring in:

• long term friendships

• successful career

• positive lifestyle

• innovation and invention

• public speaking

• creative writing

• having strong relationships

• having a loving family

• helping people

These diverse areas always surprises parents so much. They don’t realise that their child is looking so far beyond their current circumstances. We all want to live a good life, this isn’t something our children don’t dream about either, not even if they are currently living a very good life. Children as young as 8 years old have been able to identify mentors and here are some popular candidates who make their lists:

• Grandparents - for fostering loving family relationships

• Scientists - for innovation and creation

• You Tube stars - who the child can relate to and sees as being honest and authentic

• Authors and artists/illustrators - for those children looking to express their creativity

It is really important that parents stay out of the mentoring roles. Children cannot learn everything from you, unfortunately. Encourage them to find mentors by:

• Identifying what sort of questions they have;

• Making the mentor pass very strict criteria the child identifies as important;

• Helping them to research the mentor if they are unreachable and/or make contact with the mentor if it is a family member or friend;

• Understanding that children want to be able to see the similarities between themselves and their mentors. Appearance has a lot to do with it too - include individuals who are the same gender, culture, personality type so that they can ‘see’ themselves in the other person and be inspired by their successes.