5 Secrets On How To Encourage Your Child

Having a positive mindset is essential for everyone to carry on well with their daily lives. With positivity a child is then able to deal with challenges in a more rational manner rather than emotional. The first step is to instill optimism. Your question would then be how? Well, there are a couple of things you could start of with that could help you and your child to manage things better. For instance ;

1) Stop The Complaining / Whining habit.

When confronted with a difficult situation, the first thing that should cross your mind is to “ Say and do something positive that will help the situation; it doesn’t take any brains to complain.” What this means is always look out for a solution to a problem as opposed to complaining and in the end none of your problems are solved at the same time, precious time was wasted whining when it could have been handled better. Being human we all complain. What if you reduce your complains, and witness the changes in not only your child but your life too. Change the way you look at things & situations and it will be a leading example to your child. Avoid indulging in unnecessary stress and fix your problem then and there. The key to this is being positive, having a positive outlook and this will then teach the child to behave in a balance manner. Once the child has understood the importance of being rational and having a balanced emotions you will start to find it way easier to encourage them with discipline, rules, life choices and so on so forth.

2) Set The “ I CAN DO IT ” Attitude.

This is basic teaching, a child when given something to do, always push the child to complete it. Completion is the first step to mentally training someone to eliminate the “GIVING UP” attitude. If there are several tasks, make sure that they are able to learn to gage how they are going to complete all of it with a given time frame? Will they start with the hardest one? Will they go for the easy things first? That one is a freedom of choice, and the freedom to make mistakes. But the end goal here is to ensure that the child understands that no matter what choice they make at the end of the day all tasks must be completed. ( e.g.: Homework, cleaning up after play time, washing the dishes, helping with the chores.) By entrusting your child to complete given tasks, already gives them a sense of being capable, noted from Tamar Chansky, a PHD child psychologist and the author of “ Freeing Your Child From Negative Thinking.” With this feeling of being cable will drive a sense of responsibility to follow up after. Depending on which age they are, they are only given things that they can handle but as they grow there are going to be challenges and tasks which are going to be handed over to them even if it’s not within their range of capability. The tricky part here is that if the child was not groomed with a foundation of “ I CAN DO IT”, then immediately the reflex action would be, I CAN’T. This is what we want to avoid, so the journey of showing your child the optimism of completing something is by affirming them of their qualities, hidden talents, or even special skills. This would keep the fire burning in them to want to improve, and stick to the positivity lane.

3) Educate them on Risk – Taking on tasks.

It is highly important to allow your child to go up to their fullest potential, by this it means constant development of new skills. However in line with that comes obstacles and problems that a child may face. Allow your child to go for it even if it scares them or they think it’s too difficult. They need to face challenges and take risks so that they can understand consequences, failure, and struggles. Make them practice their positive mindset, their optimism of “ I CAN DO IT” and taking a leap of faith in whatever they do. Then remind your child about being grateful for what he/she has been given. Teach them about being privileged and not being spoilt, this is to instil gratitude and a sense of being knowing that there are children out there who are not so fortunate.

4) Colour Your Life With Positivity.

In any given situation there is always going to be two sides, the positive and the negative. You need to learn to start creating your own sunny positive vibe and environment. Everyday is a new day, a new chapter, always look for the precious moments and brush away anything negative that comes along to ruin your day. Through your actions, your child will observe & feel the need to have a positive outlook on life too! Try to think about the good things and focus on that. For example, if you were to take your child to the Zoo, get him/her to point out things that make them smile or feel happy inside. This is one way of getting them to be appreciative of the good things and to always be reminded to “ Look On The Bright Side Of Life.” -Eric Idle-

5) Surround Your Child With Positive People.

This is the part where the societal section plays an important role. From the beginning you should already have your child surrounded by positive and bubbly personalities. A child can be anywhere but you will need to monitor from afar about what kind of people are they constantly surrounded by. There is no way to completely avoid your child from being exposed to pessimism, but so long as you are able you need to build a support system of people that will bring out the positive aspects of life & having that will help you to raise and optimistic child who will not be difficult to encourage in doing life the positive way.