The saying ‘Life is a journey’ is often used when talking about our experiences and our learning. In order to make some understanding of this statement, we need to figure out what each word means. As parents, we have a difficult but rewarding job of nurturing our children so they will develop into responsible, contributing members of the society they will be a part of. As I mentioned at the Parents as Partners meeting and in the November blog post, what the nurturing parents do for their children up to the age of 18 is very crucial in helping their children navigate their world for the remaining years of their lives. Remembering that our parents provided those nurturing years for us, we now need to do the same for our children. A lack of guidance during those foundational years can lead to challenging times for our children. Not allowing our children to encounter both pleasant and unpleasant experiences is unfair and unwise. If children have not encountered difficult and challenging situations because the challenges were ‘smoothed out’ or ‘eliminated’ by the parents, how will they be able to handle something more difficult when they are adults and expected to overcome them? When children are adults, there are circumstances where there is an expectation for these young adults to handle the situation. However, if these young adults have never had the opportunity to experience the situation prior to the one they are currently in because their parents eliminated the uncomfortable opportunities when children were young, parents have now done a very big disservice to their children. It is important to think about possible future implications when we make decisions for our children. As I mentioned before, if safety is not an issue, allow your child to experience it as it will give them skills to make them stronger.

Life is a journey that begins at a young age. As parents, it is our responsibility to provide a variety of opportunities so our children can experience a vast variety of them. Ensuring that we allow our children ample opportunities, even though the opportunities may be challenging, will help our children to gain new skills while strengthening the skills they already have. We also need to model this by embracing opportunities ourselves whenever they arise. The conversations we have with our children about what they learn  at school also help to elicit opportunities to enhance their critical thinking by integrating what they learn in school to the world around them.

To embrace each experience, we need to consider that learning is like a never-ending staircase. Please note that for every skill we develop we have a separate staircase for each skill. The concept of the staircase helps to visualize the individual steps, and therefore if we become good at a skill we improve and climb up the steps in the staircase. Each step is slightly higher than a regular step, so it requires a bit of work to go up each one. This staircase is parallel to the concept of Growth Mindset, created by Carol Dweck [Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets (fs.blog) ]. This never-ending staircase of learning allows us to go in either direction as necessary. If we get stronger, we climb up a step or two, but we have opportunities to go back a step or two to retrace where we have come from if we need more practice.  Without making mistakes, we cannot learn and become better than where we were before we made our mistakes.  They are the glitches that are needed for learning to occur and to improve what we are doing.  The most important part, however, is what we learn from those glitches.  By looking more closely at where we went wrong, we can then figure out what we can do differently.  IF we do this step, it means we are truly learning, and will not repeat the same mistake over and over again.

Encouraging a growth mindset begins with how we phrase comments. When making comments to children, it is important to validate them and their efforts with comments that will encourage them to keep trying and persevering, even when things get difficult or result in unexpected ways. Comments such as “You’re smart” or “You are really good at that” stifle the motivation to try as the child may feel that they are already smart and do not need to go beyond what they are already doing. Instead, comments such as, “I see that you tried really hard in printing that word” or “I can see you are improving in your reading.” For further examples, you can click on the following link. Growth Mindset For Parents | Growth Mindset Parenting (mindsetworks.com)