Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he explains why parents can go about motivating their child with encouraging words, rather than pushing too hard.
Positive reinforcement is really the way to encourage children, rather than pushing too hard and scaring them away. At the same time, however, parents need to stretch the boundaries of what their little ones can achieve. This is very important in their physical and emotional development throughout life.
As a child gets older, parents should continue to stretch the boundaries in terms of challenges that their child is going after and accomplishing. But these expectations as to what can be done for a little one should be like a rubber band—you can stretch the challenges and the goals further out, but if it becomes apparent that the little one isn’t going to be able to achieve a certain goal, then the expectation needs to be brought back in to a more realistic place. And that rubber band can keep being brought in until it is at a level where the child can handle the task or the goal and accomplish it.
When children experience failure, they have the tendency to stop trying. They will just lose interest in whatever is going on. So it is in your interest, as well as theirs, to stretch out that rubber band, and if they can do the skill, great. You will congratulate them and be proud. But if it looks like they aren’t going to be able to handle it, then you keep bringing that rubber band back in until you are at a level where it is something that they can accomplish. Rather than deeming them a failure, allow them to have success. That is what encouragement as a parent is all about.
Common Mistakes
The most common mistake I see parents making is trying to push their kid way too hard to achieve something that they haven’t been prepared for. Developmentally, there is a good chance they may not be there yet, especially if they haven’t gained the developmental building blocks to get up to that skill.
An example of this at My Gym has to do with the high bar. For a kid, hanging on the high bar is one thing. But if you put a child up into a front hip circle, where he is on the high bar with his hands below them, he may get scared and feel like he doesn’t have the control anymore. This is a confidence issue, because not everyone is ready to do that front hip circle on the high bar just yet.
Instead, parents should let them go on the high bar at their own pace—hold them, let them swing around a little bit, and let them build that confidence until they feel secure without your grasp. Maybe let them put their legs on the bar, hang upside down. When they feel totally confident and supported, they are going to go right up into that front hip circle. But if you push them into it too fast they are going to be too scared and they won’t want to get near that bar in the future.
That’s an analogy that works in so many situations. So parents need to encourage their children and allow them to grow, but avoid pushing them too fast into things they are not ready for. Pushing them will almost always backfire.
