Issue Number 22

Our mission is to give you the latest information on how to raise self-reliant, emotionally healthy, highly successful children and to help you maximize the benefits of their participation in sports.

How to Help Your Child Begin the Planning Habit

From past newsletters you have learned that the third and fourth key skills that will ensure your child’s future success is their ability to: a) ask for help, and b) plan.

The idea is to get your child to combine asking for help with planning. If they do this in the right way, it will make them stronger and more self-reliant.

Consider what low achievers do: they keep asking for the kind of help that will weaken them. They try to get others to do their work for them rather than ask for suggestions on what they can do for themselves, becoming dependent on others. High achievers, by contrast, take responsibility for their goals and, once they finish planning, take action, increasing their skills and confidence.

The first step in teaching your child how to plan is to help them list every imaginable resource they can turn to for help, including books, magazines, newspapers, the internet, friends, teachers, relatives, etc. Making this list is the key to effective planning.

The kind of help high achievers use has the following characteristics:

• The source of help strengthens their skills. Once the skill is learned they hone it for a long time until they are masters at it. Scientists have studied how long it takes to master any skill and have come up with a useful guideline: ten years (which is why it is now referred to as the ten year rule).

• The source of help strengthens their confidence and independence. This creates an ever-expanding cycle of achievement: the more confident an achiever becomes, the more they ask for help and the more challenging goals they set.

The best way to teach this to your child is by doing something together. Cooking is a great to involve young children in the process. You can plan a meal together, starting by pulling out some cookbooks and looking at recipes. Allow your child to participate in choosing what meal to cook. This will build their inner motivation to succeed and pave the ground for future self-reliance. Don’t help too much. Let them know a few broken eggs are a small price to pay for the feeling of accomplishment.

With older kids I also suggest you find ways to show them how planning will make it more likely that they will get what they want.

Remember, the root of confidence is in planning, taking action, and seeing the relationship between effort and results. A child’s hopes hinges on their belief that if they do the right things, the results will follow.

Wishing you a happy and productive week, this is Rafael Beer