Make Your Child Smarter

Practical and Useful Tips on Making Your Children Optimistic and Expectant

By Andrew Loh

Teaching and making your children understand the benefits of being optimistic and expectant in their life is time consuming and task oriented. In fact, it may take a considerable amount of time to make your children realize the importance of staying optimistic and expectant. Here are some tips and suggestions to teach your child how he or she can learn about optimism and expectancy:

Help and assist your children taste and experience what success really is: Success is sweet and encouraging! It also addictive and cajoling! When you child tastes his or her first success, he or she will be encouraged to repeat it many more times. Success is also a big precursor to unlimited self esteem and confidence! Ensure that you help your children taste some basic success. One simple thing is to assign basic household chore and ask them to finish off the task within a predetermined time. It could be anything, from arranging all the cutlery and crockery on the table. Or, it could be just arranging their room by putting way toys and playthings.

Outcome: Your child will feel very proud of you because you allowed him or her to finish assigned task with so much success! Your child will also feel confident and courageous enough to repeat the task once again!

Soon after achieving success, give credit for all the hard they have done: When you assign a task and when you see your children completing the assigned task with success, your main duty is to assign credit for their success and congratulate them for future ones. Tell them that they were so dedicated in their work and how they worked so intelligently to complete the assigned task. You can use the following encouraging keywords like:

• "You are so smart”

• "You have worked so well”

• "You can do it again”

• "You are so intelligent”

Outcome: This simple exercise can raise your child's optimism and expectancy to high levels. He or she can feel that they can do any jobs with ease and efficiency. Self initiation and self efficiency are two of the important outcomes of this exercise.

In times of difficulty, ask probing questions by taking care not to criticize: At times, your children are bound to fail in some of the assigned tasks. These could be securing low grades in the class or even failing to do assigned household chore in the assigned time. If this happens, your main duty is not to criticize your children, but to teach them how effectively they can use their ability to finish a pending task with a fair degree of success.

For example:

Let us say that your child fails to do a simple mathematical formula, and as a result he or she gets a zero mark for the answer. It is natural that your child will be agitated, angry and tearful! Now, you may wish to ask your child what exactly happened while writing the answer. It is possible that your child may forget the formula or your child was too nervous to write answer to that question. Once you get a possible input, your next task is to show your child how he or she can tackle the question and in what manner time can be saved while answering the question. Once your child learns these tricks, he or she will feel confident and encouraged to attempt answering similar questions with a sense of success.

Outcome: Questions can bring answers! Probing and inquisitive questions can bring really intelligent answers. You can easily validate your child's pent up feelings, but ask probing questions that can cause or make them to see and observe things more optimistically and in a positive manner.

Teach your child ever instance of failure is a stepping stone for future success: Children always fail in life! It is quite natural! Things can wrong at any time and any place. Even adults do lot of mistakes and fail in their duties! When things go wrong, you may need to approve and understand your children's feelings. You may also wish to help and assist them focus on all future assignments. Teach them that there is always another time to reach success. You may also need to tell them how failure can help them learn mistakes and errors.

Example: Let us say that your child scores low grades in his class. You may not need to yell at him or her for those low scores. Instead, you can easily tell your child a couple of encouraging things like:

• "May be that you had a bad day! You can do well next time. But, you can do better if you do your work properly"

• "You will be great next time"

Outcome: These simple things will help your child learn and understand that failure is a stepping stone to future success, and that today's failure was good for me to understand all those errors and wrong things that really caused the failure.

Optimism and expectancy are two of the most cherished characters that either make or break the life of any person. Being optimistic is an antidote to life's possible failures and disappointments. When you children learn and master these two traits, they will be on their path to achieve success and glory.

>> Back to Articles Directory    

Don't forget to subscribe to our ezine to stay on top of the latest news on child brain development and early child development