When we think of teacher student relationships, or even parent child relationships we often think of a one way exchange of ideas. Yet the teacher who is open to learning often finds they receive as much from their students as they give.

I’ve never really seen myself as a mentor, but I often find myself naturally falling into that role when I meet certain people. There are others that I fall naturally into the role of student yet in either case we are in a constant exchange of words, thoughts and ideas and rarely do I come away from a conversation without feeling I have learned something.

We are all mentors to somebody, even when we don’t realize it. As parents, we have many roles but of all of them mentor is by far the strongest. Our children are always watching us, and learning from us.

Follow up:

They aren’t just learning the lessons we intentionally teach them, but the ones we don’t mean for them to learn as well. When we tell a little white lie to another adult in front of our child, but tell our children not to lie which lesson are they most likely to take away from us?

Last year my family saw some major problems in our local government, there was just too much fighting and negativity. People refused to respect the other people involved, and things were getting really ugly.

My fifteen year old daughter came to me and said "Mom, I want to do something about this." Eventually she decided that she wanted to stage a peaceful protest at a town board meeting.

Her initial idea was to play Beatles songs and say nothing, but she was warned that interrupting the meeting could end up with her getting in trouble with law enforcement so she chose an even more peaceful route, she wrote a poem.

At the meeting my daughter and a friend read the following poem to a room full of adults, and finished by handing each of them a flower. They were not well received by some, but they still did it.

We are the youth of the community, but we are also the voice of the future.
We look up to you, we learn from you, we believe in you.
We look to you to show us how to solve our problems in the future
We look to you to show us how to treat others with respect and dignity
Remember tonight that we are always growing, always watching, always looking to you
What lessons do you want to teach us?

With this flower, may all of your differences
all of your hardships be put behind you for a peaceful future.
That is what our grandparents did when they saw something wrong with this world
That is what I choose to do now, to remind you that we are still watching
What do you want us to learn from this?

~ Brooke Skelton

I don’t know if the other adults in the room listened to her words, but I did. Those we mentor are always watching us, and those who mentor us are always learning from us. We are always exchanging lessons, but we must first be open to learning them...