If you want your children to have respect for adults in a safe and empowering way, you’ll have to do more than just giving them platitudes about how they need to defer to anyone older than them. So to help ensure that your children understand how to be respectful and how to also respect themselves, here are three tips for teaching your children respect for adults.

Teach Them What’s Respectful And What Isn’t

To help your kids learn how to be respectful in general, you’ll want to teach them what behavior is respectful and what isn’t. The best way to teach them this is to tell them how to be respectful, show them how to be respectful in your interactions with others, and help them recognize when someone is being respectful or disrespectful to them or other people.

As a good rule of thumb, you should also teach your kids that they should show a certain level of respect to all people. This should include respect for their teachers, respect for police officers, and respect for their parents. You should also teach your kids that if they feel like they’re being disrespected by someone, they should remove themselves from the situation rather than resorting to being disrespectful in return.

Be Respectful When Interacting With Your Kids

One of the first and best ways that your children are going to learn about respect is in the way that you treat them.

In the past, people used to think that you didn’t need to show children any kind of respect. But as human beings, kids deserve respect just like anyone else, and you can show them how people are supposed to treat them by showing them respect in your interactions with one another.

To do this, try to balance parenting with respecting reasonable requests that your kids make. You should also avoid doing anything that makes them feel embarrassed or uncomfortable.

Give Them Opportunities To Rectify Disrespect

For children, it’s easy to let their emotions take over and slip into a disrespectful attitude. However, your reaction to this will help them either to learn from this mistake or to feel further entrenched in their disrespectful attitude.

To give them the opportunity to fix when they’ve been disrespectful, you can ask them if what they said or did was being respectful to others, what their tone of voice was showing, or how they could have said something in a more respectful way. Sometimes, it just takes informing them of when they’ve been disrespectful and then giving them guidance on how to handle things differently in the future that can make a big difference.

If you want your children to show adults respect, consider using the tips mentioned above to help teach them this in the right way.