Success For Children
Great advice for parents!
October 16th, 2019
By Nikki Harper
Staff Writer for Wake Up World
Great advice for parents!
October 16th, 2019By Nikki Harper
Staff Writer for Wake Up World
Parenting is tough; the choices you make
day by day as a parent are often instinctive and always made with love,
but it’s not always easy to figure out the best way to help an
individual child to be the best they can be.
Most parents want their children to be
healthy and happy, above all else, but hot on the heels of those two
wishes comes a wish for their children to be successful – however you
may choose to measure success. Fortunately, there are easy ways to
foster a potential for success in your child, and there’s research to
back up these techniques too.
1 Read to Your Child
Yes, tech can be great for kids. But as
the posters in my local library say, no app can replace your lap. Not
only is reading to your child a great chance to snuggle up and interact,
it also helps to set up good habits for life and can contribute towards
your child’s intellectual development. The benefits start young too.
According to the New York University School of Medicine, reading to
infants gives them a significant literacy boost which is still evident
four years later before they start elementary school [1].
According to the British Cohort Study, which tracks over 17,000 people, researchers found that reading for pleasure
as a child or young person was linked to greater progress in maths,
spelling and vocabulary [2]. The study looked at individuals from
similar social backgrounds who had similar test results aged 10; those
who read more frequently ended up with higher test results than those
who read less or not at all.
2 Limit Screen Time
There is clear evidence that too much
screen time can hinder brain development in very young children [3].
Screen time can affect many things in the developing brain, from trouble
with social interaction to an expectation of instant gratification and
difficulties with impulse control.
It’s a rare parent who would want to
deny their child the benefits of modern tech entirely, but the key is in
understanding where to draw the line. To help, the American Academy of
Pediatrics have produced guidelines [4]. They recommend that children
below 18 months should have no screen time at all, except perhaps for
video chats if family members live at a distance. Children aged 2-5
could have up to one hour a day of carefully chosen media time, which
parents should watch with them. From 6 years onwards, it’s a matter of
choosing the right media, setting boundaries which feel right for your
family and ensuring that it doesn’t interfere with your child’s sleep,
social life, non-screen play time, meals and other activities.
3 Eat Together
According to The Family Dinner Project, a
non-profit operating out of Harvard University, eating together as a
family has real benefits for children [5]. Their research shows that
kids who eat with their family at least five times a week grow up to
have better self-esteem, higher average grades and lower rates of depression, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.
This makes perfect instinctive sense, of
course: in today’s busy-busy world, mealtimes can sometimes be the only
real chance for the whole family to sit down together and to talk
properly. Ideally, ban phones and screens from the dinner table,
otherwise the whole point of the family togetherness is lost.
4 Model Patience and Delay Instant Gratification
As an adult, most things that you want
take time to achieve. Sadly, very little comes to us at the click of a
button or the swipe of a screen – very little worth having, that is. To
set children up for long-term success, it’s important to model this
concept. Whether it’s showing your kids how you work for long term
career success, helping them to train a pet or helping them to set up a
savings account for something they really want, find ways to show your
child that the best things in life require effort and patience. Training
for a favourite sport is also a good way to teach this. What matters is
that your kids understand the importance of showing up day after day to
work towards a goal, even when they don’t feel like it.
There’s research to back this up too, in
the form of a classic 70s Stanford experiment known as the Marshmallow
Experiment. This involved children being offered a marshmallow to eat –
but being promised that if they could wait 15 minutes before eating it,
they’d get another one. The results showed that children who did manage
to wait grew up to have better social skills and test scores and were
better able to handle stress.[6]
5 Show Them the World
We instinctively sense that travel is
good for broadening both the mind and the heart – but of course not
everyone can afford to travel extensively as a family. The good news is
that even domestic travel can have benefits for your children. What
matters most is exposing them to new sights, sounds, people and
cultures.
The SYTA conducted research which found that over 50% of teachers believe that travel
has a very positive impact on children and 79% of educators believe
travel was essential in increasing cultural awareness. The research
identified that children and young adults benefit from travel in
numerous ways, including major increases in levels of respect,
tolerance, intellectual curiosity, self-expression, adaptability and
sensitivity. [7]
6 Don’t Skip the Chores
We’re not suggesting that your kids
should be used as unpaid household help, but there is evidence that
requiring children to do some chores has a positive effect on them. For
example, in this 2015 Ted Talk, Julie Lythcott-Haims talks about the
Harvard Grant Study, which noted that its most successful participants
had done chores when they were children. [8]
7 Embrace Failure
It’s really hard to watch your child
struggle and fail and your instinct may well be to step in and to help
or even to take over. Try not to. As counter intuitive as it may seem,
the best thing you can do is to allow your child to fail, at least some
of the time. By constantly stepping in, you are sending a message that
your child isn’t capable and cannot succeed alone. By contrast, if you
allow them to fail, you are sending out a message that you believe they
can do it, eventually. Trying and failing but then trying again also
instils in a child an appetite for hard work and perseverance, which
they will need in the real world.
According to Dr Stephanie O’Leary, a
clinic psychologist and author of ‘Parenting in the Real World: The
Rules Have Changed’, “Over time, children who have experienced defeat
will build resilience and be more willing to attempt difficult tasks and
activities, because they are not afraid to fail.” [9]
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