Make Your Child Smarter

The Innumerable Benefits of Optimism and Expectancy - Teaching Basics to Your Children

By Andrew Loh

The innumerable benefits of developing traits of optimism and expectancy have been proved time and again by international research. People who are expectant and optimistic can enjoy better health, experience less stress in life, increase their chances of personal and professional success and achieve whatever they want in their life. On the other hand, pessimistic people tend to loss interest in their life, suffer from acute and stressful situations, and fail in their personal and professional life. While most of our characters and traits are inborn, as soon as we enter this world, it is still possible to develop and nurture a number of traits and characters that are so beneficial to our life and future.

Lack of optimism or expectancy in life could be a direct result of nurturing pessimism in the early part of our life. While it is true that most of the personal characters in us are intrinsic and inborn, can we influence our children's inclination or tendency towards optimistic or pessimistic mode of thinking? Recent research suggests that it is possible to teach the noble characters of optimism and expectancy to our children, especially in their early formative years.

Optimism could be defined as an inclination to expect or hope for the best in life and look forward to all upcoming events and situations in a positive and encouraging note. In the context of expectancy, you can define it as a tendency to expect only the best in life and look for those things or events with intrinsic hope that they will happen in spite of all odds and obstacles. Optimism and expectancy has a number of beneficial features to upkeep mental health and avoid depression and anxiety.

Some children are born naturally optimistic and persistent in their life, while others may be too pessimistic and negative in their nature. Children who are negative become more sensitive and fragile to even a small setback either in the classroom or home. These children may take things very seriously. On the other hand, positive and optimistic children are energetic and agile in their nature. They always look forward to positive things and thoughts.

Optimism and expectancy are learnable skills and they start right in your home. However, children tend to become pessimistic just by observing and following their parents and other members of the family. The way in which you act and behave will be the ultimate yardstick. The more optimistic and positive you are the more will be the probability of your children learning and mastering these characters.

It is possible for you to teach your children the basic principles of optimism and expectancy. It all depends on how you help your children to examine and change the way and manner in which they think about the things or issues that happen around them. Here are some general tips and suggestions to educate your child about the importance of learning and developing optimism and expectancy:

Note: The first principle of learning optimism and expectancy is to make your children learn and understand that the feelings or responses to any given event are not the byproducts of those events themselves, but also the way and manner in which they think, decide and feel about those events or scenarios.

Tip: The first obvious step is to help your children shift their thinking process towards understanding the things or events around them in a positive manner. You may need to teach your children by identifying very specific and exact cause and effect relationship as soon as they experience some failure.

Example:

Child: My color pen is not writing!

You: It may be your fault! Did you close the cap? The pen is dry because you did not close the cap!

Child: My God! It is so hard to believe that! How do I finish writing those colored shapes and patterns? (Obviously, your child will be angry, disappointed and discouraged. Now is the time to assure and encourage your child that the work can still be done)

You: Don't worry! You can still finish off that project. There are several ways of doing it!

Now, you will need to show how your child can find alternative solutions to the problem. When you show those solutions, your child will become optimistic to learn that there are some ways of getting things done in spite of odds and obstacles.

In most of the cases, reframing the problems and available scenarios will help your child to find some workable solutions. In the above example, your child will be thinking just on the effect of not finishing the work, and it is natural that he or she is not tuned or oriented to find valid solutions to the problems. When you teach your children how to solve a problems even with a number odds stacked against them, they can learn a number of traits like:

1. That there are a number of ways available that can help us in finishing off the pending task.

2. That being hopeful and expectant will provide rich dividends.

3. That working tirelessly on finding possible solutions is a success mantra for life.

Teaching and empowering your children about optimism and expectancy is in your hand. As a responsible parent, you will need to make your children learn these principles, so that they can have a fair chance of achieving success in their personal and professional life.

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