The message was: Skills and achievement come through commitment and effort.
-Carol S. Dweck, Ph. D.
A couple of months ago we talked about Dr. Ginott’s quote in his book Between Parent & Teenager that says: «Describe, don’t evaluate. Deal with events- don’t appraise personality. Describe feelings, don’t evaluate characters. Give a realistic picture of the accomplishment, don’t glorify the person.»
Today we will talk about why this way of communicating with our children is so effective. When we tell our children, «You’re the best,» we’re telling him that he’s perfect, and that we appreciate a free mistakes person, that he/she should know all the answers and that things should be easy for them.
When we tell our children «wow, you made a great effort to finish this drawing or whatever he/she was doing,» we are appreciating the effort he made to finish the work, we are teaching them that things can be difficult but with effort and dedication they can finish whatever they intend.
In the book «Mindset» by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. he tells us the following «Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and impairs their performance.» After reading this we may think «But I just want my kid know he’s smart,» but Carol explains: why does praising intelligence hurts our children? She says «This makes children doubt themselves as soon as something is hard or something goes wrong.»
The child can reach the following conclusion: “ If I’m smart how could I be wrong and how come the other child got a better grades than me? Perhaps I’m not as smart as they say”.
Carol gives us a recipe to help our children to always be willing to keep learning «If parents want to give their children a gift, the best they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes , enjoy the effort, and keep on learning. »
During the next days we can work on value the efforts of our children and observe the difference this causes on them.
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