Effective Parenting Skills - Encouragement is the Seed of Success

If you are a parent, of course you want your children to do their best. However, what kind of parent are you? Do you encourage your children, or do you intimidate them? If you encourage your children, you stress that they should work toward a certain goal. If you intimidate your children, you stress that they should win at all costs. Especially if you tell your children that they should win, it means that the results, not the effort or intention, are what count.

Of course, this is not healthy and can cause you to have very unhappy children. In extreme cases, it can even lead to suicide. We have all heard of the honor student who does not make top honors and therefore commits suicide. In less extreme cases, such a student may become an underachiever just to avoid even trying and failing. In either case, this kind of stress causes not success, but failure or even worse.

You may have a child who is obsessed about becoming the "best" even at the expense of others. By contrast, you may have a child who is completely immobilized or paralyzed by fear of failure and won't even try. Therefore, the best way to circumvent this situation is to focus on encouragement and on having your child be happy and well balanced rather than on being a "winner" or being "successful" in the traditional sense of the word.

Although praise is a good tool to use intermittently, by far the more important tool is encouragement. If children are praised for everything they do, even failures, they become confused when they get out in the real world and are not similarly compensated for their efforts or lack thereof. Therefore, a careful balance of encouragement coupled with an expectation that the child will put forth the very best effort possible, is what is necessary.

To do this, first, determine what atmosphere you create at home. Do you encourage your children or do you criticize and intimidate them? In an illustrative exercise, we used targets that were parent-volunteers. During the exercise, they were aware that they were undergoing an excise. However, when they were intimidated, criticized or otherwise given negative messages, their self-esteem nonetheless suffered. Now imagine that this situation occurred in real life and focused on a child over a period of time instead of as a one-time exercise; now, imagine how that can affect the child. It can make him or her insecure, to say the least.

Now, it should be noted that giving encouragement does not mean that you can pamper your child. What you want to do is to give your child emotional fuel that will allow him or her to continue a difficult or long-term task that may not have immediate rewards. If you pamper your child, you assume that he or she cannot do for himself or herself, thus doing the task for him or her. If you do this, you create a child of that becomes extremely dependent and is afraid to try to do anything because he or she feels so inadequate. This type of overindulgence can make a child irresponsible and dependent on others for things he or she can do for him or herself.

Praise is another element that comes into play here, but again, it should be noted that praise is something that is used intermittently. It is given as a reward for something well done. This is as compared to encouragement, which is given during the duration of the task to keep motivation and enthusiasm up.

Make sure that you give praise when it is appropriate to do so. Do not give empty praise. Rather, give praise for something truly deserved, such as for a job well done. In addition, when you encourage, focus on a childrens strengths rather than weaknesses. Encouragement is nonjudgmental and accepts the current level of accomplishment for each child as an individual, rather than comparing him or her to others, such as with a competitive exercise.

In addition, make sure that your expectations of each child are appropriate to his or her talents, skills, age and maturity level, and abilities. For example, if a child is very overweight, you won't have him or her do a half-mile lap the very first day, even though his or her athletic peer might very well be able to. Rather, you would focus on that childrens current level of ability and perhaps have him or her do some moderate walking, coupled with some weightlifting and a few jumping jacks. As the childrens fitness level increases, you increase your expectations. The point is, though, you start where the child is and you don't try to overextend the childrens current abilities. In this way, children won't become discouraged and will be motivated to continue.

As with the above, you need to help children set realistic goals. If one of your children would want to enter a contest, make sure that you are right there in his or her corner as they enter it. Make sure that he or she knows that odds are relatively steep and that expectations should be realistic. However, have him or her do the contest for the joy of whatever the competition is, not the prize itself. If the prize should come, it's icing on the cake, but not the goal.

Permissiveness is another downfall parents sometimes incorporate. If you are overly permissive with your child and do not set boundaries, you both confuse the child and make him or her unaware or unconcerned that others have rights too. If your discipline is inconsistent, it leaves the child feeling out of sorts and confused, with no boundaries. It also teaches the child that he or she can get away with things you do not want him or her to. Therefore, set consistent disciplinary practices that have defined outcomes. Positive behavior results in one outcome, while negative behavior results in some sort of punishment or refusal of reward. This sort of discipline teaches children to stay in touch and be responsible for their feelings, so that they can relate well to others and can be empathetic towards others' feelings.

Of course, parents should also avoid ever pitying the child. Of course, sympathy is certainly a healthy emotion. If your child hurts him - or herself, of course you can soothe and make "it all better" with a few kisses. This, however, is different than pity, which means that you feel sorry for the child rather than soothing him or her for the discomfort he or she has experienced. One good way to discern between the two is that sympathy is elicited by a situation. If the child hurts him- or herself, of course it's prudent for you to go and soothe and make it better. If, however, you look at the child as someone to be felt sorry "for," this is pity and not to be tolerated. It is disempowering to the child and does no good whatsoever.

One of the best things parents can do is let their children develop their own interests and goals in life. Of course, you have to do this with a little guidance, but most often, children will be their own best judges as to what their particular talents are. Of course, you should not settle for exceptionally poor grades from a student who clearly has the ability to do better, but you should also know that traditional schooling most often focuses on linguistic and mathematical skills, rather than more artistic or spatial skills, for example. Therefore, a child who is a budding artist may not do particularly well in math, but will do wonderfully in art classes or gymnastics, for example. Therefore, although every child must get a basic education, parental focus should be on helping children develop particular talents while minimizing weaknesses.

Because you are of a different generation, of course, you should be altering your parenting skills based upon what you know versus what your parents necessarily did. Create an encouraging environment at home with respectful back-and-forth conversation rather than by the rote rule "honor thy father and mother" or by demanding "respect," for example. Children should be allowed to give opinions and participate in decisions, even if they do not always get to make the final one. They should also be given responsibilities according to what they are capable of.

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