Challenging But Not Overwhelming
Is anyone feeling challenged by the recent events in our lives? How about overwhelmed?
In our family, we have been keeping focused by setting intentions for the day every morning. How many language and math lessons will you complete? What are you planning to read, to cook, to embroider? How will you exercise? Unprompted, my middle son self-motivated to make a new Daily Intentions poster for the week. That was exciting to see!
Know what, though? Using this method as a way of practicing integrity proved really stressful in the first couple of days! We realized that life is taxing enough right now without imposing several requirements on our scholarly outputs. At the end of the day, instead of pride or joy in what we had accomplished, there was weariness and strain. Not good!
Instead of scrapping the project, though, we recognized yet another lesson opportunity. (Remember, teachers, be prepared for those surprise teaching moments!) Setting intentions is a chance to practice the concept of challenging but not overwhelming. Successfully creating this balance in a given task is one of the secrets of being a great teacher.
We have all seen a child’s interest wane when a task is insufficiently challenging, just as we have witnessed frustrations mount when the opposite is true. The ability to learn plummets significantly with disinterest or, even worse, the arousal of fear or preoccupation with failure. Take the following story from our experience as an example of an “overwhelming” mistake:
Every Memorial Day, we enjoy our first swim of the season at a family camp. The pool is Olympic-sized, and if you can swim the length of it, you get the reward of swimming in the deep end all week.
The previous summer was a huge success for swimming in our family. All of our children were not only safe in the water but could lap the neighborhood pool many times without tiring. We figured that each of them had an excellent chance of passing the family camp swim test this year.
On the first pass, one of the three made it across, and the other two fizzled out about halfway. Encouraged by their relative level of success, we revved them up for another go. Imagine how exciting—these kids could barely dog paddle a year ago! This time, another made it all the way while the final child stopped halfway again.
We dug in deeper.
Every time we tried again—on that day and all the rest of the week—our son did progressively worse. We tried boosting his mental strength with pep talks. We adapted and incremented the challenge in every way we could imagine. The result was breakdown after breakdown—in our son and us.
If we do not challenge our children, or ourselves, for that matter, we stagnate. We stay in the kiddie pool all our lives and never experience the exhilaration of a successful splash from the high dive. We should not, however, jump in the deep end drawing is the likely outcome. Or, even if we do have that ability, we must be able to recognize (as the Santillo Family should have done at family camp) when the task has moved from being challenging to being overwhelming.
Our next post will be thoughts on Assessing Readiness to offer guidance with this concept. For today, use your parental intuition to detect whether your kids are disengaged or overwhelmed. If so, help them make adjustments. Find the right amount of work, a good level that challenges without leading to breakdowns. Even better, teach your kids to set their own balance, and you will be in the sweet spot of accomplishing the primary goal—helping them build functional and fulfilling lives.
Stay tuned…