About 3 month ago, the kids, our 7-year-old daughter Noff and our 13-year-old son Tsoof started playing the “Punch Buggy” game. If you do not know this game, it involves looking out for a buggy (a Volkswagen “bug”), and the first person to spot one punches the other and says “Punch Buggy”.
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The State Triangle shows the relationships between our thoughts and feelings (mindset), our words (language) and our posture and actions (body language). Change on and the others will change.
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It was the summer of my first year of Special Education studies and I was initially given a group of 12 kids in Grade 5. They were mostly boys (for some reason) and the dynamic of the group was problematic. The camp was located in a wonderful forest with a creek running through it and overlooked by beautiful ruins of an ancient village.
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Two weeks ago, I talked about the importance of parents’ involvement in their kids’ homework. Last week, I asked you about the best time to give kids homework. Today, I will cover the value of homework and how parents feel and project that feeling towards their kids’ homework.
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Just like praise and appreciation, rewards are a wonderful way to motivate kids. I think it is very important to understand that rewards are second-level “carrots”. Usually, rewards are required when you have exhausted all your praises and they do not seem to work. Sadly, this usually happens when your kids do not trust that you mean what you say.
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As your daughter grows older and develops a relationship with a steady partner, the feeling of losing control grows too. Being the mother of a young woman (OMG, she is 20!), I see a lot of value in teaching teenage girls the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships.
I am sometimes surprised to meet new clients who cannot understand how they got themselves into an abusive relationship. As you can imagine, getting a women out of an abusive relationship is much harder than not getting into such relationship in the first place.
If you are the parent of a young daughter, you are probably asking yourself, “How can I make sure my daughter never gets herself into an abusive relationship?” The good news is you can! And if you do it before the relationship starts, you have a better chance of succeeding.
Every person has different motivation tools. Some people are motivated by “carrots” (encouragement and rewards) and others by “sticks” (threats and punishments). Some want to get something for their efforts and others do things to avoid being hurt or feeling bad. I will describe all the motivation tools, but I would like to encourage you to shift away from sticks and towards carrots. In my opinion, sticks are short term motivators, but they are draining and stressing both for parents and for kids. Success on a test to avoid negative parental reaction has an expensive emotional price attached to it – fear, stress and loss of trust.
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The questions in Motivating Kids (1) provide a way to give your kids’ “wanting” muscle some good practice and to allow you as a parent to help your kids get what they want in life and be happy. The next step is to chunk each dream down to realistic, day to day pieces that do not involve genies, kings, fairies or lottery tickets.
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I once said (OK, I have said it hundreds of time) that kids believe everything you tell them. The younger they are, the truer this statement is. Parents do not know they are lucky that their young kids do not question them as much as they should. In fact, because kids do not doubt what their parents say, I would like to encourage all the parents reading this post to take advantage of this phenomenon and plant good thoughts and beliefs in your kids’ little minds. So if you are a parent and you want to learn how to plant good thoughts in your children’s mind, buckle up and enjoy the ride.
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Many times, I hear the question “How do you motivate kids to do things?” Most parents in the world would like to know the “magic tricks” of motivating their kids to succeed, to be friendly, to be healthy and happy. I guess it is part of having kids, that desire for them to be “in the zone”, where everything is easy and gives a good feeling. In this sense, kids and their parents are exactly the same. Motivation has no age.
In my parenting classes, 100% of the participants want their kids to have love, success, friendships, confidence and happiness. All of the parents look for the formula they can use to help their kids get these things.
In the coming weeks, I will be posting about motivating kids, covering all aspects of motivations and how you, as a parent, can use each and every one of them to give your kids what you have always wanted to. With each post, I will also include tips, exercises and/or printable resources to help you on this exciting mission.
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