growth mindset Archives

7 Dec 2023

Parenting with Love Through Life’s Boundaries

In our ongoing endeavour to establish healthy boundaries that nurture the mental and emotional well-being of our children, there are three challenges that often come up to test our efforts:

1. Desire to be liked: You may worry your children won’t like you when enforcing boundaries and consequences. While it isn’t pleasant to hear your child yelling, ‘I don’t like you’, it doesn’t mean they don’t. What they are really saying is, ‘I don’t like your boundaries. I don’t like your consequences.’ Understanding this, helps you respond with the intent of encouraging growth rather than reacting solely from the emotions you may be triggered to feel, like anger or guilt.

2. Remembering when you were a kid: You may find yourself thinking, ‘I know what it’s like to feel disappointment and I don’t want that for my child.’ Attempting to protect them from disappointment is not in their best interest. We want kids to grow into adults that know how to manage emotions like disappointment rather than avoiding them.

3. Wanting them to make their own choices: While it’s important to encourage independence and decision-making skills, many parents make the mistake of thinking their child has the logic and reasoning of an adult and will naturally make the responsible choices (I have had those moments). Unfortunately, our children don’t have the life experiences to pull from, nor the maturity to know what might be in their best interest.

Strategies to Establish Healthy Boundaries

1. Clarity on your boundaries: Knowing what boundaries and consequences work best for your child ahead of time will stop you from making a decision in the heat of the moment – one you may later regret. Plus, letting your child know the expectation ahead of time gives them clarity and awareness.

2. Be their parent: Growing up, when I would push back on my mom’s boundaries, she would say, ‘I’m your parent and I have a job to do.’ This mindset allowed her to enforce the structure that I needed, even when I didn’t know that’s what I needed. She didn’t allow my disappointment to become her guilt. Remain sturdy. Remember you are arming your child with important life skills.

3. Stay consistent: Children thrive on consistency, and it helps them understand the boundaries that are in place. Of course, there will be times when you will fall off track, but be honest with your kids by saying, ‘I haven’t followed through with what we talked about and that’s on me. Moving forward my expectations are…(fill in the blank)’. Your kids will appreciate your honesty.

4. Preventing entitlement: Establishing clear boundaries helps prevent a sense of entitlement. When kids understand that there are limits to their wants and behaviours, they learn the valuable lesson that the world doesn’t always cater to their every wish. This realization fosters a more realistic and appreciative perspective, reducing the likelihood of entitlement.

This is What I Know: When your child pushes back – that’s their job – your role is to maintain a healthy boundary. By staying steadfast, they will learn to cope with disappointment, frustration and setbacks, essential for bouncing back from life’s challenges.

Until next time,

12 Oct 2023

How to Handle Kids’ Disappointments and Strengthen Bonds

Life is a series of ups and downs and it’s natural for children to face disappointment along the way.

When my son confides in me about a disappointment, my natural instinct is to think of solutions and ways to fix it, especially if he is feeling sad and dejected.

Disappointments are valuable life lessons that help develop skills like perseverance, empathy, resilience and problem-solving. If you try to protect them from disappointment, it will stop them from developing these essential skills. Without a healthy approach to disappointments, a young person can feel like a failure, causing them to give up or quit.

Below are four strategies to help you and the child in your life effectively deal with disappointment:

1. Acknowledge Emotions

Let them know that it’s okay to feel disappointed and that it’s an emotion that everyone encounters at various times in their life. Remember to acknowledge your own emotions when you see a child experiencing disappointment. Being able to feel your own discomfort is an important part of teaching them to lean into uncomfortable emotions.

2. Validate Emotions

Refrain from dismissing their emotions. Avoid phrases like “It’s not a big deal” or “You’re overreacting.” Such statements invalidate their emotions and can make them feel unheard or misunderstood. Instead, validate their emotions by saying, ‘I understand you’re feeling really disappointed right now’ or ‘That must have been really tough for you.’

3. Teach Emotional Management Strategies

Help them identify healthy ways to release their emotions that bring them comfort and calmness when they are upset, such as deep breathing, counting to ten, or finding an activity that relaxes them.

4. Encourage a Problem-Solving Mindset

Together brainstorm potential solutions or strategies to improve the situation. This approach gives them a plan to better prepare them for handling future disappointments.

Providing a supportive and understanding environment goes a long way to helping a child not only navigate disappointment, but also develop resilience.

Until next time…

5 Sep 2022

I can’t do this…YET!

I was having a conversation with my 12 year old nephew about heading back to school and asked, ‘Are you looking forward to going back to school?’

‘Kind of.’

I wanted to know why he said ‘kind of’.

‘Well… I do like the social part, however I worry about my performance at school, like doing well on tests and getting good grades. I’m not good at certain subjects.’

I shared with him the power of ‘YET’.

‘You don’t know it YET!’

‘You aren’t good at it YET!’

‘You haven’t achieved it YET.’

His demeanour changed as he said, ‘oh I like that.’

The Power of ‘YET’

Teaching your children/students to add the word “yet” at the end of a sentence changes how they think, feel and react to challenges and mistakes. It creates a mindset of growth, possibility and hope. It gives them the confidence to stay determined and put in the effort. It reminds them that they have the ability to learn.

I have created a “yet contract” that your children/students can sign to remind them to add the word ‘yet’ at the end of their sentence whenever they start to say ‘I can’t’ or ‘I’m not good at it’.

Until next time…

27 Jan 2020

Praise Effort Regardless of the Results

My husband coaches our son’s hockey team. His coaching philosophy is one I admire and wholeheartedly believe in. Here’s what he shared with the parents early in the season:

“We’ve been praising the full effort of the kids and are less concerned with who scores… not that we don’t acknowledge the goal, we praise how the goal came about.”

I love this concept and think this coaching technique can carry through to how we as parents and educators interact with kids on a daily basis.

Consider doing this: Praise their effort regardless of the results.

For example, your child or student receives an A on their recent test. Do you say:

A. ‘Wow! You’re really smart!’ or…

B. ‘Look at what you have achieved. You chose to put in the effort and be determined. Excellent work!’

More and more studies show that choice B is more beneficial for kids. Using the theory of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor, choice B teaches our kids a growth mindset, while choice A encourages a fixed mindset.

With a growth mindset, people approach challenges knowing that they have the ability to learn and to improve every day if they put in the effort. With a fixed mindset, people believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talent, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that. Their goal becomes to look smart all the time. (Wikipedia)

I think there’s more to unwrap here…

How do you teach children a growth mindset and the value of effort?

Let’s use hockey as an example.

When players understand the importance of being open to learning they become confident enough to put in the effort to embrace new skills. They start to realize that, even though they may not have learned all the skills, it doesn’t mean they never will, it just means they haven’t learnt them YET! This mindset gets them ready to take on the challenges of training and development. And regardless of whether they win or lose, they learn to value the experiences.

This mindset will look like this:

‘I will put in the effort’.
‘I like to learn new skills’.
‘I am a problem solver’.
‘I can overcome challenge’.

Praising effort helps kids see the importance of the actions they took. If they know that being determined to go after the puck and staying focused on skating with a full stride helped them score a goal, they’ll know to stay focused on practicing those skills in order to score again. If we tell them, “You’re so talented! Great goal!” how will they know what they need to do to score again? How will they know which character traits they used to get there?

By attaching specific character traits to their efforts we show children that character based choices matter and what their effort and character looks like in action.

How do you shift your words to praise the effort in every day situations?

Here are some examples:

Great job! (what made it a great job?) You were so determined to learn your spelling words!
You’re a good friend. (what makes them a good friend?) You showed generosity because you shared your snack.
Way to go! (what did they do?) You were kind. You held the door open for them.

The more we focus our praise on acknowledging the efforts and the character traits used to achieve the desired end result, we teach children that the journey matters—how they succeed is just as important as succeeding.

Exercise: Start to praise the effort instead of the results with your own kids or students. Pay attention to how you praise and pause in those moments…what character trait could you add?

Want to share how you’ve changed the praise dialogue for your family or school? Tag me on Instagram with an example of how you praised the effort to teach your child/student about a character-based choice they made. Let’s work together on this!

Until next time…