Planning is a great motivator for many kids and helps overcome many of the fears kids have. When kids learn to plan their time, their actions, their budget, their social life and their activities, they get a sense of control instead of feeling overpowered by external sources.
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As you will be well aware, most of the systems in our life are made to suit some standard, albeit nonexistent, person. We all have to follow the same laws, we are measured and compensated in the same ways as our work colleagues and our kids go to schools that treat them the same too. How annoying!
Read One School Fits All – NOT! »
Fear is our emotional reaction to something we perceive as danger. Fear is the most painful stick in the motivation toolkit and unfortunately, it is the most common tool parents use to motivate their kids, mainly because their parents used it and their parents used it…
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One good way to inspire motivation is to use others who have succeeded as role models and try to learn from them. Can you imagine kids growing up to think that many people around them, both younger and older, are sources of inspiration?
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Effective reading is an important tool for gaining knowledge. When I was a kid, my teachers provided us most of the knowledge we got. Today, my kids get most of their new knowledge by themselves, much of it by reading. In fact, I believe that getting our kids to love reading is the single most significant thing we can do for them.
Your kids will have to read a lot during their school years and even more during their life. So developing their effective reading skills is essential to their knowledge, development and their success.
Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for anyone to read:
1. For information and knowledge
2. For pleasure
Last week, I posted ways to boost creativity in kids and gave 5 tips to help kids with their creativity. Today, I will cover 5 more tips to boost creativity.
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Success depends on the ability to move forward and requires persistence. We succeed at work, in our social life, our parenting, relationships, love life, finances and health only if we can keep moving forward in spite any setbacks.
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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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