The most Valuable Thing I Taught My kid, I didn't Teach her

My daughter, Emma, knows all kinds of things. Most of these things, I have worked with her on. Since she was a baby I made animal noises to her and labeled the noises with the name of the animal so that she would know what sound animals make. I'm not sure why this is a necessary skill for kids, but I sure spent a lot of time teaching her.
When most people think of what they are teaching their kids, they think of things like ABCs, Words, Animals, Shapes, Colors.

**TANGENT** Notice how all those nouns are capitalized? I do that all the time with my nouns, I feel like they should be capitalized. Come to find out, Im German, and in Germany, they capitalize their nouns. WHOA! I just blew you mind, I know.

I think the most important lessons I have taught my daughter are the lessons that she learns from watching me. I am not so much teaching her as I am leading her. It is so much easier to teach a child what to do than it is to teach them what NOT to do. I have tried it both ways, trust me. One is filled with "good job! you did it!" and the other lots of testing limits and "you get in timeout and stay there miss!"

I have a few bad habits... ya, i know, impossible right? But it's true. I am selfish, not generous, stingy, frugal, whatever you wanna call it, I have a bad case of "mine!"I noticed this bad habit a while back and decided that I was not going to pass it on to my child and was very consistent with sharing.

She is great at sharing now, because (darn it) every time she asks for something that I have, I give her some and tell her that its nice to share. This practice leads me to eat cookies in the bathroom on occasion.... but still, she is learning to share.

Of course that isn't the only instance of leading instead of teaching, but my readers are all pretty smart. I think you get it.