Help your child develop a growth mindset

“If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a life-long way to build and repair their own confidence.”

(Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential)

With Term 2 ending today and reports coming soon, a positive attitude toward learning is more important than ever. To foster resilience and a love for learning in your child, be sure to:

• Focus on what your child is doing well and reserve judgment;

• Praise your child for her/his efforts, dedication and perseverance (not marks);

• Help your child understand that failure is not a dead end, but an opportunity to learn and grow;

• Help your child come up with strategies for tackling difficult challenges, based on strategies that helped them succeed at things in the past;

• Remind your child that each one of us has the power to improve our intellectual, physical, social and emotional skills.

The most interesting journeys in life are those with ups and downs along the way, and school is no exception: the path to success is all the more rewarding when it is filled with interesting challenges!

To help your child be more focused and less anxious at school, try helping her/him find ways to be calm and relaxed at home.

As Dr. Stuart Shanker explains in his book “Self-Reg,” spending time doing something calming can profoundly help people deal with stress. However, he emphasizes that it is important to understand the difference between calmness and quietness.

Quiet:  When a child is playing a video game, watching a movie or on social media, she may appear calm, because she may not be moving or making noise. However, her brain is being excited, and she is not in a state of self-awareness.

Calm:  When a child is calm, she is in an entirely different state. She is relaxed, aware of what is going in inside and around her, and she is enjoying herself and the state she is in.

To help child self-regulate and reduce stress, help her discover activities that help her feel calm. As Dr. Shanker points-out, “there is no one-size-fits-all answer to what a child will find calming.” So, have your child experiment: they may find their fit in reading, music, art, or physical activity.

 

To help build your child’s resilience, she/he needs to connect less with technology and connect more with her/his peers.

Studies have shown that teens who have robust social connections – with their family, friends, school and community – are better able to cope with adversity when it comes their way.

So, if you want to boost your child’s resilience, try cutting-down the time she/he spends on social media and increasing the time she/he spends socializing. Hanging-out with friends can help teens build their self-esteem and self-confidence and learn valuable cooperation and communication skills.

Here are two articles that shed light on this topic:

Psychology Today – Resilient Teens

The Economist – Teens and Screens

Set an example for your children: spend less time on digital media and looking at a screen … and try leaving your devices at home when you go on family outings!

In her book, “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age,” clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair explains, among other things, how:

• Excessive exposure to digital media interferes with a child’s development, including the development of empathy and other important social skills;
• Communicating via digital technology makes it harder for some teenagers to develop healthy identities and relationships.

Discover the transformative power of gratitude.

Feeling and expressing thankfulness and appreciation, even for the smallest things that happen to us, has been shown to:

• Improve physical, emotional, and social well-being;
• Decrease stress, anxiety and depression.

To help your child become an autonomous and resilient learner:

Be sensitive to your child’s individuality and foster it, because there are many different ways to be successful.

Here are few tips from psychologist David Lubinski of Vanderbilt University, who has conducted extensive studies on learning and intelligence in young people.

•  Emphasize the importance of hard work: Praise your child’s effort, rather than his/her natural abilities or high marks. This will help your child develop a growth mindset.
• Teach your child to embrace intellectual risks and failures: It’s important to learn by making mistakes, because you often make discoveries along the way. Kids should see challenges as something positive that can make them better.
• Offer kids different a variety of experiences and opportunities: If you can, present your child with a variety of learning experiences, from sports, to arts to science. Camps and classes allow kids to grow intellectually and emotionally and can help them make like-minded friends.

To help your child become an autonomous and resilient learner:

Limit the amount of time she/he spends in front of a screen.

Please ensure that your child:

• Spends less than one hour a day playing video games;
• Turns off all technology one hour before bed time (TV, smartphone, tablet, games).

“Calm is an entirely different state from being mesmerized by some movie or video game. When a child is calm, she/he is relaxed, aware of what is going on inside and around her/him, and engaged.”

 “For many children with attentional issues, the barrage of rapidly changing images, loud noises and bright colours deployed by these (video) games keeps them glued but acts as a brain drain, providing brief but exhausting jolts of energy that is dysregulating – like junk food for the brain.”

 – Stuart Shanker, psychologist, researcher, professor and self-regulation expert