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Health & Fitness

Parenting for a Successful School Year and Life

Use a mindful parenting approach to support your children, encourage active engagement, and cultivate a "growth" mindset.

Each school year provides a unique opportunity to teach our children about the necessary life skills and ingredients to having a meaningful and successful year. However, instilling positive traits and habits within them is not only for achievement in the classroom, but, more importantly, for their entire life. By looking at their academic and social world with an eye on the bigger picture, we can do much in the way of helping our children secure a healthy place in the world. 

Yes, it’s important to challenge our kids to get good grades and to give them tools to study and excel, but these goals need to be seen in the context of our larger parenting goal. Thinking more broadly, we need to think about cultivating  characteristics of resilience - taking risks, persevering in the face of daunting tasks, becoming independent in their thinking, and coping with adversity along the way.

How do we do this? We can start by using a mindful parenting approach that focuses on instilling the characteristics mentioned above. I have found it critical to give children trust and room to explore based on their developmental age and maturity. It is difficult for a child to learn to trust their judgment if we as parents don’t show them that they are trusted. Related to this is showing respect for their thoughts and feelings. Although we may not agree with them, their thoughts and feelings are still genuine and as important as ours. Supporting our child’s interests and goals is a great way to provide opportunities for them to practice skills of resilience, as they will have “buy in” to the process (e.g., much more so than learning to persevere through meaningless homework). Finally, and of critical importance, we should be models of the behaviors and values we believe to be important. Our children look to us to show them how the world works and how to respond to different situations.

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Now to the idea of success—what does it look like and what does it mean? It is important to let our children know what success means overall -- not just in the classroom. The popular organization founded at Stanford’s School of Education called Challenge Success states that society has become too focused on grades, test scores and performance, leaving little time, opportunity, and energy for our kids to become resilient, successful, and meaningful contributors to the 21st century. Research shows that the number one indication of a healthy kid is their active engagement in the learning process, not just getting good grades. Grade levels should not be considered more important than a child’s ability and willingness to constantly learn. Memorizing statistics to ace a test is a far less fruitful lifelong skill than being willing to open the mind towards new things, expanding the ability to absorb, comprehend and assimilate new information. Kids that are engaged in their lives and their world are going to want to contribute to their surrounding society.

The Growth Mindset 

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In my book Raising Creative Kids we speak about this concept with regards to the work of Professor Carol Dweck, whose work centers on motivation, personality and development. Her key contribution to social psychology relates to implicit theories of intelligence as presented in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She states that individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where ability comes from. Some believe their success is based on innate ability; these are said to have a “fixed mindset” on intelligence. Others, who believe their success is based on hard work, learning, training and doggedness are said to have a "growth" or an "incremental" theory of intelligence (growth mindset). Individuals may not necessarily be aware of their own mindset, but their mindset can still be discerned based on their behavior. It is especially evident in their reaction to failure. Fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement on their basic abilities, while growth mindset individuals don't mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved and learning comes from failure. These two mindsets play an important role in all aspects of a person's life. Dweck argues that the growth mindset will allow a person to live a less stressful and more successful life. So as parents, we should consider the mind of our children as a muscle and teach them that the more they exercise it, the more they will learn and grow.

So what is the most effective and simplest way to cultivate a growth-oriented mindset? Focus on, and reinforce, effort over outcome.  Help your child focus on the process rather than the finish line. Again, it is their personality that ultimately defines who we are, not our grades and achievements.

Understanding Anxiety

Another key component to guiding our children through a successful school (and life) experience is to help them recognize and understand their fears, worries and anxieties. There is no way to get rid of our worries altogether but we can let our children know that worries and fear are a natural part of life. As part of teaching skills of resilience, we can also teach our children the physiological effects of these emotions on their body and mind, how to investigate their thinking that is causing them worry, and how to challenge and change their thinking so it is more adaptive and helpful to them. We can help our children access their "great thinking brain" to overpower their emotional brain. We must also help them to recognize the difference between giving themselves a break versus pushing themselves to strive harder. Critically important, we must do what we can to recognize and reduce the stress they are under. High levels of anxiety reduce a child’s ability to think clearly, perform to their potential, and meaningfully experience life. An important question to ask is whether we are inadvertently increasing our child’s feeling of stress and anxiety based on our performance expectations, and if so, can we make some modifications.

During this wonderfully challenging job of raising a healthy future adult, remember to stay on target for the big picture. Remember that it is the effort that matters more than the outcome. Remember that persistence is more important than mastery, and the process more than the quantitative results. Remember that our goal is to cultivate problem solving, engagement and resilience in our children.

In the end, it’s important to try to keep a balanced perspective on the present with an eye towards the future. Most parents want their child to get into a good (or great) college and experience pressure around the increased competition among higher and higher GPAs and children who seem to be building their resumes 18 hours a day. Remember that there are 5,000 colleges in this nation and there’s a place for everyone to learn and develop. There is time to figure out what we want to do and many roads that one can take. People make a living at many different endeavors and some of them --  in the future our children will be working in-- have yet to be created. We all know that happiness and life satisfaction are not solely based on going to a particular school or having a particular job. Hard work, persistence and resiliency are key to lifetime success. Allowing our children to focus on learning, rather than the pressure of where they will go next and how they will live up to expectations is a key ingredient in your guidance.  And remember, parenting is a process. Ultimately,  we need to love and support our children and do our best in guiding them (and allowing them) to become who they are and engage meaningfully in life.

Dan Peters, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and co-founder of the Summit Center, which provides educational and psychological assessments, consultations, and treatment for children, their parents, and families. Summit Center works with all kids, including those who are gifted, those with learning challenges, and those who are both gifted and have challenges.

 

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