Motivate Your Children to Succeed
Posted: Sunday, September 03, 2006
by Cindy Downes
Cindy Downes
My son, Wil, was flunking kindergarten. His teacher insisted that he couldn’t read, he could barely write his name, he had no ability for math, and because he cried when the other children teased him, he needed counseling. I was devastated.
At home, he seemed to be a normal five-year-old: happy, obedient, and inquisitive; so my husband and I were at a loss as to what to do. A few days later, we happened to watch a TV program featuring Drs. Raymond and Dorothy Moore talking about their research in childhood development. I sent off for their book, “Home Grown Kids;" and after reading it, my husband and I decided to homeschool.
During the rest of the day, we did art projects, performed science experiments, listened to music, or went outside to play or explore nature. As he was able, Wil practiced handwriting; but it was such a struggle that, at age eight, I taught him to touch type. We slowly added arithmetic which consisted of daily drills in the basic math facts.
By age ten, he was beginning to read and write on his own. He knew all his basic math facts, could tell time, measure, add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Desktop computers had recently arrived on the scene, so we purchased an Apple® IIe and introduced him to BASIC programming.
By age twelve, Wil was working at grade level. He was also developing a keen interest and aptitude for art so we purchased a Macintosh® computer that included a simple drawing program. After he mastered this program, we bought him professional software including Quark®, Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and Macromedia Director®. Within a few months, he was using these programs to create reports, posters, and animated presentations that illustrated what he was learning in school. He also began to create logos, business cards, brochures, newsletters, and teaching-tape covers for local business people and occasionally even got paid!
During the next five years he not only completed high school at home, but he also took an art class as a “Concurrent Enrollment" student at a local college and also worked part time doing computer graphics for a video company. He was well on his way to success.
Would you like to motivate your children to succeed? Corporations spend thousands of dollars a year training management to use leadership principles that will them motivate their employees to succeed. You can use these same principles to motivate your children succeed.
1. Expect the best from your children. Look for strengths that others may have overlooked. A study was done by Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and Lenore Jacobson, a San Francisco school principal, to find out if some children perform poorly in school because their teachers expect them to. They administered a learning ability test to a group of 5th graders. The next fall, teachers were given the names of five or six children in their new class who were designated as “spurters" (intellectually gifted) as revealed by this IQ test. The teachers didn’t know that the test had been rigged and that these “spurters" were chosen at random. At the end of school year, the children were retested. The supposed “spurters" gained as many as 15 to 27 I.Q. points. The teachers also described these children in more positive terms and said that they had a better chance of success in later life. The only real change was the teacher’s attitude towards the child!1 Don’t let labels or past learning experiences have an effect on what you expect from your children. As Goethe advised, you should “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and help them to become what they are capable of being."
2. Help them focus on their own unique gifts. Skills that develop early in one child may develop months or years later in another. Talents that develop in one child may never develop in another. Mozart played the keyboard at four years of age and composed his first pieces of music at age five. On the other hand, Einstein was four before he could speak and seven before he could read. Both Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison were considered poor students in school. But as we know, they eventually discovered their gifts, pursued them, and became the successful people we know them for today. A child’s uniqueness is often confused with laziness or inability. Were Einstein, Newton, and Edison lazy? Of course not. Alan McGinnis says in his book, Bringing Out the Best in People, “The challenge is not to take lazy people and transform them into industrious types. Rather it is to channel already existing energies into the most worthwhile endeavors. People do not like being lethargic and bored. They will welcome the manager who can teach them to enjoy their work, or the teacher who will impart to them a love of learning that causes the school day to go swiftly." All children have a desire to achieve something, to make their life count. Your job is to tap into that desire, give them tools they need to pursue that desire, and then watch as they motivate themselves to succeed.
3. Find out what they want and help them get it. One of the mistakes that many homeschool parents make is overlooking a child’s gifts and strengths in order to focus on “what your 5th, 6th, etc. grader needs to know." Maybe you’d like your children to become engineers doctors, lawyers, and pastors. But what do they want to do? Ask questions and listen! What are their desires? Their talents? What do they like and dislike? Each year, have them set goals for themselves and write them down. Then encourage them to pursue as many of their goals as possible. This not only tells them that you care about them but that they need to plan ahead to get what they want. Be willing to incorporate as many of their goals as possible into the goals of your family as a whole. Do everything possible to help them to get where they want to go. For three years, we homeschooled in rural Pennsylvania and were miles from the nearest city. In order to provide them with the academics and extracurricular activities they needed, I made a commitment to drive 45 minutes for gymnastics, 45 minutes in another directions for art lessons, and 30 minutes in another direction for music lessons.
4. Teach them how to make the most of their time. If you push your children to do everything their peers are doing, they’ll eventually grow less and less effective. Bob Buford in his book, Game Plan, says, “Christians are working very hard at things that do not fit their skills, abilities, and interests. One way to counter this is to say no to anything that doesn’t maximize these areas in your life, even though it is only five or ten degrees off your mission." John Maxwell in his book, Developing the Leaders Around You, says, “A person should be spending 80 percent of his time doing things that require his greatest gifts and abilities." Help your children make tough choices on what academic and extracurricular activities are important to them and that suit their particular skills and interests. At age 15, Wil was not only proficient in art, but was also an accomplished keyboard player. His instructor, a professional keyboard player, was grooming him to go “on the road." Wil realized that in order to excel in one, he had to make a choice between the two. He chose to lay down the keyboard and concentrate his efforts on art. Though it was a tough choice to make, this decision gave him the time he needed to become the highly skilled professional that he is today.
5. Train them to maintain a high standard of excellence. My son had difficulty using his fine motor skills until the age of ten; therefore, handwriting was difficult for him in the early grades. Rather than force him to complete a whole page in his writing textbook, I allowed him to write only a sentence or two, as long as it was done to the best of his ability. My goal was that he would learn to do an excellent job on what he was capable of doing rather than a “just-so" job on the whole assignment. Nancy Hanks, the wife of Abraham Lincoln, once said, “My parents always told me that people will never know how long it takes you to do something. They will only know how well it is done." This became out motto; and as Wil got older, he continued to impose these same standards on himself.
6. Teach them that failure is not fatal! As their teacher, be willing to accept some mistakes. Don’t be so hard on them that they give up. When they fail, help them to learn from their mistakes and not quit. Oliver Goldsmith once said, “Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall." Encourage your children to try new skills and get involved in a variety of learning experiences even if it forces them out of their “comfort zones" or ends in defeat. At age seventeen, my daughter, Shelly, agreed to do an internship for a local doctor. As a result, she discovered that she had no desire to pursue the medical profession, saving a considerable amount of time and money spent at medical school.
7. Give them appropriate role models. Tell them about and, if possible, introduce them to successful people in the field in which they are interested. We introduced our son to local video graphic professionals and made arrangements for him to attend conventions and seminars for video artists. Suzanne, a homeschool friend and an attorney, takes her twelve-year old son to court and on the golf course with her so that he has opportunities to meet and interact with judges, lawmakers, and other attorneys. Another way of providing role models is to have them read biographies about successful people in their field of interest. A portion of my son’s literature class for high school included reading biographies of artists and businessmen such as Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Sam Walton.
8. Recognize and applaud their achievements. Businesses recognize achievement of their employees by putting pictures of their “Top Salesman" in the company newspaper or giving their “Employee of the Month" special parking privileges. Why not use your children’s successes as an excuse for celebration? Hang up pictures of their “Achievement of the Month", along with specifics about what they accomplished towards their goals. Give tokens of appreciation for a job well done, but be careful not to overdo it to the point that it is meaningless.
9. Stimulate mild competition. Have them compete in spelling bees, debate teams, or writing contests, keeping in mind that the purpose of the competition is to give them the message that if others can do it, they can, too. Cele, a school administrator turned homeschool mom, has her three girls enter their cooking, art projects, and sewing in the state fair each year. This motivates her children to do their best work and they get rewarded with ribbons or other special prizes.
10. Teach them teamwork. Involve them in activities such as sports, orchestra, or an outreach team. During the 90’s, I directed a monthly outreach team to the elderly. The team of eighteen homeschooled students, ages 5 to 17, made crafts for the seniors, put on plays, sang songs, and performed on instruments. They gave out hugs and put many a smile on lonely faces. In return, they received something intangible, yet very worthwhile: they learned that by working together they could accomplish more. As Mother Teresa once said, “I can do what you can’t do, and you can do what I can’t do. Together we can do great things."
11. Equip them to get along without you. When your children ask questions, show them where to find the answer and let them to look it up for themselves. As John Maxwell and Jim Dornan said in their book, Becoming a Person of Influence, “If you can help him (them) to become a lifelong learner, you will have given him (them) an incredible gift." As your children mature, give them opportunities to set their own study schedules. Beginning in junior high, my children had weekly academic goals instead of daily goals. They were required to complete a certain amount of work but were free to schedule their work as desired. During high school, they were given monthly and yearly goals with appropriate consequences applied in the event they got too far behind. For instance, during the years Wil spent afternoons volunteering for a video company, his consequence for getting behind was that he had to stay home rather than be a “grip" on the next “shoot."
These eleven principles were paramount in motivating my son, Wil to succeed. After graduation, he started his own video graphics company and was so successful that TV Guide came after him to work for them! Why not use these same principles to motivate your children to succeed?
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Notes:
1 Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968)
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