When you look around, do you notice what you need to notice? Have you ever wondered why there are some people who can see things that other people just don’t see? It seems like some people just have this knack for looking around and noticing things others don’t. Maybe they notice there are three crooked pictures on the wall or three people wearing orange shirts. Sometimes they might even notice a job to be done—like a spilled glass of soda or an overflowing trashcan.

Many kids are great at noticing what’s going on around them. Think about all the times this past week when you heard something like:

“Dad, the trash is overflowing… again. Someone should take it out.”

“Mom! My uniform is still in the wash. I need it for today’s game!”

“I’m BORED!”

“Ugh! The lawn is FILLED with DOG POO!”

They are quick to tell us something needs to be done, then go about doing something else—as if it were an expectation our job is to take care of the situation.

It’s not that our kids are ungrateful or lazy. It’s not even they don’t want to help. Maybe they’ve just never been invited to help or don’t understand they can take initiative and do it themselves.

What if our kids could grasp what my old pastor Jeff Manion used to say, “They is you”?

They is you.

On the surface, it might not make sense but here’s the gist: We see things that need to be done all the time… But often, we figure it’s someone else’s job and think, “they should really do something about that.”

Well, what if “they” should actually be “you”?

I wonder this is where we start when we teach our kids about initiative:

They = you
Someone = you

I’ll be honest, this is often easier said than done. Remember the time I let my son help take out the trash? Letting kids take initiative and do the work themselves takes time and effort. It’s easier to do the work ourselves and get on with our day, but that’s doesn’t help our kids in the long-term. If our goal is to raise adults, we need to put in the hard work now so our kids will thrive later.

But when you break it down, it doesn’t have to be so hard. Here are four ways to make “they is you” part of the way your kids see the world around them:

1. MODEL IT

We probably don’t go around announcing that we see the trash overflowing then tell everyone we’re going to take it out to the trash bin. That might be ridiculous. But when it comes to kids, they often need help making connections between what they see and what they can do about it. When we talk about the ways we’re taking initiative, our kids see it in action and can learn how to take initiative in their own life.

2. LET THEM DO IT

Kids can do more than we expect. It’s often easier or faster to do the job ourselves, but why not give your kids a chance to put initiative into practice. If they come to you with a problem, help them think through how they could follow through and solve the problem. Then, let them do it. It might not be perfect, but at least they’re learning what it means to see something and do something about it. Empower your kids to know they have what it takes to get the job done. If they feel like they’re able to show initiative, chances are they will.

3. BE PREPARED

My wife had the brilliant idea of setting up the house so our kids can do a job when they see it needs to be done. There are cleaning kits in each of the bathrooms in our house. The washers/driers are front-loaders and the laundry detergent is at kid level. Each of the kids has their own laundry basket. We put games and books for the kids on the bottom shelves. Chargers for technology are accessible. Everything in our house is thought through to give our kids a chance to help. They know if they need something they have access to what it takes to complete the job. Sure they might need help sometimes, but they’re empowered to begin the job on their own. They’re able to take part in making our home run smoothly.

4. PRAISE THE EFFORT NOT THE RESULT

Just because they’re doing the job doesn’t mean they’re always going to get it perfect. If we get mad or frustrated at them for how they do the job, they may not want to risk taking initiative another time. Celebrate them for taking a moment to try and do something they saw needed to be done. When it comes to initiative, starting and finishing the job is what matters; their skills to accomplish the job with excellence will develop over as they continue to practice.

Research proves that kids who demonstrate initiative are more successful in the long run. They get better grades, find themselves in less trouble, and show increased resilience when faced with difficulty. The more we can help our kids learn the valuable lessons of initiative while they are young, the more prepared they’ll be to face the world when they grow up.

Your kids have likely screamed 862 different versions of “That’s not fair!!!!” from their small lungs before their fifth birthday.

Whether it’s a hug you gave her sister but not her, why her friend could get a new Elsa doll but she couldn’t, or why the other kids always seem to get more Lego than your son . . . kids have an inherent radar for fair, which usually means even. Which can also mean “I got a little more.” (Why is it only unfair if they got more than you did????)

And we haven’t even gotten to dessert yet.

I remember watching my mom as a kid as she doled out scoops of ice-cream, watching like a hawk to make sure mine was at least as big (if not bigger) than my sisters. Even the good folks at Dairy Queen got the stink eye from my ten-year-old self if my cone ended up smaller than it should have been.

Navigating fairness was doubly fun when I became a parent.

Fortunately, my wife Toni brought a parlour trick with her from her family of origin. Rather than having a parent cut the cake or pie or scoop the ice cream, as soon as my kids were old enough, my amazingly sharp wife would select one of our kids to dole out dessert.

This was the rule: One child picks; the other chooses.

Brilliant.

The incentive to measure out exact portions in that scenario is through the ROOF! You would think my eight-year-old kids were measuring dessert by the microgram the way they made sure that each piece was exactlythe same. Talk about an incentive to be fair.

If only life was that easy. But it’s not.

Fairness in life does not mean we all get the same sized slice of the pie. Real life means sometimes we get more pie than we should and other times we get zero.

Reality means sometimes you hustle hard and don’t get the summer job when your lazy classmate did. Life means sometimes you study your brains out and you still don’t get an A.

We still pay attention to how dessert gets doled out at our house, but as our kids got older we realized that there was absolutely no way to shield them from the reality that life isn’t fair.

Often our sense of fairness gets violated because we don’t like the result. She did get more than me. He got rewarded when I didn’t.

Adults who feel cheated often develop some downright unattractive attitudes: they feel entitled; they get angry and they walk through life with chips on their shoulders. Not exactly the kind of human beings you want to raise.

Just watch any parent who walks into a classroom or principal’s office demanding that their somewhat undeserving child get the marks/recognition/results the entitled parent believes they’re owed. Not healthy for anyone.

So as our kids got older, I started to tell them outright that life isn’t fair. That sometimes people get things they don’t deserve and that the people who should have seen something come their way sometimes don’t.

Perhaps the biggest shift I encouraged our kids to make was this: stop focusing on the outcome and start focusing on the process:

Study hard.
Be generous.
Be kind.
Hustle.
Conduct yourself in a way that you’ll be proud of years later.
And don’t worry about the results. Leave those to God.

You know what happens when you do those things? You find peace.

Sure, there’s a little disappointment if you didn’t make an A, or if you didn’t make the team, but in the chalk talk afterward, simply ask: Did you do your best? If the answer is yes, then we’re just incredibly proud of you. If you didn’t do your best, hustle harder next time, because life isn’t fair. And you can’t control that. Just do your best and work your heart out.

It’s funny…but when you focus on the process—what you put in to something—you often end up more satisfied with the results—what you get out of something.

Plus, you actually tend to do better when you adopt those attitudes because you brought your best without any expectation of reward.

Guess what kids? Life isn’t fair.

But that doesn’t mean life isn’t good.

Do your best. Be kind. Be generous. Hustle hard. You’ll be so thankful you did, regardless of how it all turns out.

THE STORY OF THE UGLIEST CHRISTMAS TREE

In our first year of marriage, I was still finishing up my education degree while my husband worked for a church as a youth pastor. We were poor. Even when we dug under the couch cushions for loose change (which we frequently did), we barely had enough to make ends meet.

It was Christmas, and we had to figure out how to celebrate it in our tiny one bedroom apartment. We were able to buy a scrawny tree from a discount lot near our church but what about decorations? Lights, ornaments, and tinsel seemed tremendously expensive to a young couple that regularly ate ramen and mac and cheese out of the .69 cent blue box. I looked around and found a piece of leftover red material and decided to make my own Christmas bows for the tree. A great solution for an expert seamstress, which sadly, I’m not. We ended up with saggy wads of material that instead of casting a festive look seemed to whisper tired defeat.

Last week as I helped my 26-year-old daughter decorate her small condo for Christmas, I tried to describe the hideousness of our tree 34 years ago. It leaned to the right. We had to hide the dried up part in the corner, and I forgot to water it so it quickly got worse. We didn’t realize until later that tree had bugs that got infested in our cheap apartment carpet. But we loved that tree. Geoff, to this day, says it’s his favorite, partly because it was our first, but more because we didn’t have the sense to know any better.

As I shared this story, I found myself laughing at my pitiful attempts, and our conversation took a turn. It shifted from the sad decorations to the hard but wonderful parts of figuring out what it meant to be married and just starting our life.

This often happens with stories passed down from generation to generation. If we’ll tell them in their unvarnished glory and let our kids ask their uncensored questions, we may just find ourselves in conversations that really matter. Here are a couple of things that telling stories can bring to your family.

STORIES WITH HONESTY BRING PERSPECTIVE.

It’s great for our kids to hear our discouraging and imperfect moments. It makes theirs seem not so insurmountable. For Brittainy and I, the conversation took a deeper turn to finances in general, and I was able to share the story of when I got my corporate credit card taken away because I kept forgetting to turn in expense reports and losing my receipts. We were able to laugh and share some “me too” moments that helped us both see each other with kinder eyes.

STORIES OVER TIME BRING A SENSE OF BELONGING. 

When our kids were little, we would often tell them, “You’re a Surratt!” Being young, they would many times look at us with a look of “So what?” But as we’ve shared the rich and sometimes bizarre history of our family, they have begun to catch what it means. As we’ve told the stories, some of them again and again, they’ve caught the bigger story and are beginning to see their part in it. They come from a long line of folks who sometimes didn’t have the sense to know they couldn’t do something, so they went and did it anyway. We are a family who makes mistakes and screws up, but we lean on God and each other when we do.

STORIES WITH FAMILY CONTEXT BRING CONNECTEDNESS AND PURPOSE. 

Our kids love the stories of their great grandfather who couldn’t pronounce Psalm (he didn’t believe in silent letters) and their grandmother who when she was frustrated would tell her kids to go play in the traffic. They see themselves in the imperfectness and quirky sense of humor. They relate it to themselves when they hear the stories of humble beginnings and being who God called them to be wherever they chose to serve. They know they’ve been born on purpose into a family who loves them no matter what.

As your family ends this year and heads into the next, think about the family stories that maybe you kids don’t know. Think about the ones they do know that might need to be told again. And again. Take some minutes to laugh and get honest and entertain the “Why in the world did you do THAT?” questions. They may just take you where you’ve never gone before.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

1. What are the stories about yourself or your parents that could help your kids see the bigger family picture of where you’ve come from?
2. What is a family story that has meant a lot to you? Why? Do your kids know the story?
3. How have you seen stories work in your family?