To Be The Best Parent for Your Children, Maintain a Teacher’s Mindset
Think about your favorite teachers growing up, the ones who pushed you to achieve your full potential and inspired you to keep striving for improvement. Think about what each of those teachers did and you’ll likely find one commonality:
They expected the best possible outcome for each of their students.
To be an effective parent for your children, it helps to adopt the same outlook. We do not want to be like the people Zig Ziglar once described as going through life looking for faults, as though “there is a reward for it.” That’s no fun for you or anybody else.
Instead of looking for things our children do wrong, we will do well by adopting a three-point teacher’s mindset: look for the good in their behavior, believe they can accomplish what we are asking, and help them create new possibilities for the future.
Here, we’ll explore each facet of this mindset in more detail.
Look for the Good
A good teacher always looks for the opportunity to draw attention to the ways in which his student is succeeding. Instead of telling a struggling swimmer how much farther he has to go, we can celebrate how far he has gone. Instead of pointing to the error of breaking a dinner plate, we can applaud how diligently our child cleaned it up.
Indicating how our children are acting in accordance with our lessons puts them in a better state of mind and makes them more receptive to future correction.
They will be less defensive and more likely to absorb the information because they will intuit that we are on their side. This mindset makes us better instructors and people.
Sometimes it requires enormous patience to be a good-finder! Some days it might seem that our children are walking disasters, destined to keep making the same mistakes.
But if we hold our corrections until they can be preceded with praise, no matter how challenging that may be, we will always get better results.
Believe in Their Abilities
Being a positive teacher requires a genuine belief in student abilities.
Our students—our children—see that belief reflected in our eyes, and they begin to develop their self-worth in relation to our positive expectations.
My mom believes I can do this, so maybe I really can!
Whether you are teaching a young child to ride a bicycle or helping a teenager apply for college, your belief that she can achieve what she has set out to achieve will carry her far. In fact, it is almost a prerequisite for her success.
On our end, believing in our children’s abilities gives us the strength to carry on as their teachers. It is hard to invest the necessary time and energy in our lessons if we are not convinced that our children are going to ultimately succeed. Your faith in your students must be rock solid and thoroughly communicated to them.
Create Future Possibilities
In addition to these first two traits, we must have a mind open to future possibilities. You can help your child create whatever possibility she would like to imagine.
For example, you could help her create the possibility of being a black belt, an expert musician, or a master chef. What would it feel like to be that black belt? As that expert musician, what will you do today? What steps did you take to become a master chef?
The more compelling the possibility, the more readily our children will take action to make it real. We encourage our children to see future possibilities, and then we help them create and undertake all the little daily steps necessary to get there.
In the same way that we can create the possibility of professional achievement, we can also create the possibility of personal development. Use the same tools and enthusiasm to help your child envision the future as a person of learning, integrity, and service.
How do you approach life to maximize your learning opportunities? What have been the hardest challenges to your integrity, and how have you succeeded in maintaining it? How does it feel to be of service to the members of your community?
The Teacher’s Mindset
All three facets of the teacher’s mindset help us parents effectively communicate the lessons that are important to us. Drawing attention to good behavior helps children feel more comfortable learning from us and leaves us feeling better about teaching them. Believing that they are capable of success is necessary for a positive outcome as well. And to inspire our children to action, we can help them imagine possibilities, however far-reaching.
As parents, the only lesson that matters is the one we are teaching right now. Simply put, yesterday’s lesson is gone, and tomorrow’s lesson is yet to be.
Whether a teaching moment is thoughtfully prepared or arises by chance, and whether it is a new idea or well-visited subject, we must not waste the opportunity with half-hearted stabs. We must treat it as the most important lesson we will ever teach.
How do you do that? By teaching every lesson as though the success of the students you are teaching, your children, truly matters—because it most certainly does.