Four Mental Steps to Provide A Balanced Life for Your Kids

You most likely want your kids to have a more balanced life. You can create a balanced life with the mental sandwich: part work, part play, part serious thinking, and part restful enjoyment. Those four categories are wide enough so that you can include most everything your children do in there, and you can also see immediately when they are out of balance.

A balanced life is a great idea for kids but extends, really, to all things. Back in the 1980s, I worked for a man who started a business in his basement. Over the course of his working life, he built that business up to the point where he eventually sold the business for over $220 million dollars. He had to sell the business because although he had five children, not one of them was capable of running the business. In fact, none of them was capable of working. They’d grown up having everything handed to them.

Having money is great. Can you have too much? It’s a trick question. Having too much isn’t the issue. In one sense the problem with that family was too much money, but the real issue was a balancing of life issues. The family was all about money and not much of anything else. What if, with all that money, he would have made them get jobs, earn things, work hard? A more balanced life for each of them would have resulted.

Here’s another example of not living a balanced life: I used to work with a successful lawyer who, when he hit 50, became depressed. He had three children who were all off to college, and he told me he really didn’t know them because the entire time they were growing up, he had been in meetings. He would work Monday through Friday until 9:00 at night. He would often work on Saturdays and Sundays. There’s nothing wrong with being a success in your career, but he lacked the ability of balancing life and work. His career was all that mattered. He would never agree with that, and his actions spoke louder than his words.

Whatever your children like to do, whether it’s swimming, soccer or science projects, encourage them to work really hard at it, but then, teach them to walk away from it. Show them how taking a break from it will give them a bigger perspective on it. If you focus on all four parts of the mental sandwich of life, their school work, eventually their careers and their relationships will be in balance with all the rest of the things that make their lives successful, enjoyable and satisfying. The key to a balanced life is using all four parts of the mental sandwich.