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Raising Can and Able Children
How can we raise confident children in a growing world of negativity?
As parents, our job is to build our children up by fostering their independence and allowing them the time to act on their natural curiosity.
If you tell your children you believe in them, then they will believe in themselves. A confident child develops and displays belief in his or her abilities that manifests itself as self-trust.
How Can We Build a Child’s Confidence?
- Reinforce your child’s positive traits
- Encourage their pursuits no matter what they are and whether you approve or disapprove of them
- Extend trust to a child by giving him or her tasks to complete as they see fit and letting them own responsibility for those tasks
- Act on your child’s strengths (artistic, athletic or academic) so subsequent tasks become easier over time to master, and
- Allow your child to fail to achieve success.
Which is where Dr. Maria Montessori’s individualized learning enters the fold. Several core outgrowths of the Montessori Method begin with our toddlers and pre-schoolers. For example,
- Placing students of differing ages together in the same classroom so children learn from other children.
- Engaging children’s responsibility during the school day to include tasks like food preparation, ensemble mealtimes and clean-up
- Allowing children to work at their own speed
- Nurturing each child to build inner strength and confidence, and
- Making time for practice to fully understand a concept before moving forward.
One traditional adage says, “Every winner was once a beginner.” This is so true!
As parents, we must encourage our children to keep at it—no matter how hard the project is. Through our mentoring and teaching, and the child’s repetition and practice, we help break down our kids’ fear that a task is too hard, complex or complicated. In other words, we change the word ‘can’t’ to ‘can.’
Yes, that may involve our children ‘failing’ at a particular task, but kids learn from mistakes—and our job is to let them learn from mistakes rather than protecting them from failure. As our children reach adolescence, they will be ‘able’ to succeed because of trial and error—and stopping procrastination of ever-harder tasks as a result.
As they say, “You gotta believe!”
And as a result, “I think I can” develops into your gifted child confident enough to express “I know I can!”
Once your children develop a confidence and trust in their abilities and pursue actions that help them progress a day at a time, then you have helped them inspire a life-long love of those pursuits. Boom, you’ve created a blooming of the human spirit—and that is what Montessori is all about!
This story was written from multiple articles, interviews, blogs and commentary, including statements by Kristin Edwards, M.Ed., co-founder of LMS; and, Maureen Healy, nationally known author and authority on childhood development.
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