Teaching your children to be optimists is the most valuable, life-enhancing thing you can do for them. Optimistic children are more likely to be happy, healthy, to have friends and to achieve success at school – important stepping-stones to becoming caring, productive adults.
In most cases, a child’s style of explaining good and bad events (see pp.14–16), which sets the stage for optimism or pessimism, develops gradually up to the age of about nine or ten, by which time it is well defined.
Babies and toddlers have no concept of success or failure. They are motivated simply by the process of learning something new. At around two years of age, children become aware of their parents evaluating their behaviour, which makes them seek praise and recognize disapproval. From the age of three, children begin to set their own standards of success and failure and to appraise their performance independently of other people’s judgments.
There are two paths along which a child’s explanatory style might develop: toward mastery or toward learned helplessness.
Children who are mastery-oriented believe that their successes come from their own ability and effort, and their failures from external factors. They are confident that if they try hard enough they will overcome challenges. They also believe that they can improve their abilities by trying harder. Because they feel they can control their environment, mastery-oriented children take pleasure in their activities and are motivated to persist despite setbacks. These children gladly face new challenges, which helps them develop their problem-solving and coping skills.
Children with a learned-helplessness orientation often attribute success to luck and failure to low ability. They operate on the assumption that ability is a stable characteristic that cannot be changed. They don’t feel that they can improve by trying harder, so they are likely to give up, leading to increasingly low expectations of success. Pessimism develops because they believe that they cannot control or change the outcome of a situation. They derive their motivation to do well from a desire to avoid criticism. Using the perceived judgments of other people to guide their behaviour causes them to lose touch with the positive feelings that come with achievement and sharpens the pain of failure.
As with adults, children who explain their world in a pessimistic manner are at risk of depression. For example, approximately three per cent of children in the United States struggle with depression at any one time. Recognizing the signs is not always easy. Children who are depressed do not necessarily look or act sad: aggression and irritability are more common symptoms. Any marked and persistent change in your child’s behaviour warrants concern and intervention. Always err on the side of caution.
As a parent, there are many ways in which you can give your children the opportunity to develop an optimistic explanatory style founded upon a belief in their own abilities and an appreciation of the value of making an effort.
The most important tool that you have at your disposal is your own attitude. Do you refer to the positive side of life more than the negative? Do you come up with positive explanations when things go wrong? Share your positive self-talk (see p.35) with your children so that they can use your optimistic thoughts as an example. Tell them stories about difficulties that you have overcome.
In order to strengthen your child’s sense of personal responsibility for their successes, praise their effort rather than their ability. Effort is something that they can control directly and immediately, whereas ability can only be developed over time as a result of effort. So, for example, if your child gets a good grade at school, say “You worked really hard on that project” instead of “Look how smart you are.”
Use descriptive praise to help your child make their own evaluations and learn to praise themselves. Descriptive praise makes it clear to your child what they have achieved. For example: “You’ve brushed your teeth and got yourself ready for bed – thanks for listening to me” rather than “What a good little boy you are for listening to me.” The second version imposes your evaluation on your child, which may hamper their ability to make their own judgments. Similarly, when your child shows you their latest artistic creation, you might try asking “Tell me about your picture” instead of telling them “What a good artist you are.”
Do not reward indiscriminately. Rewarding everything your child does sets them up always to expect external motivation, which decreases the intrinsic satisfaction they can gain purely from their own effort and achievement. Studies show that external, or extrinsic, motivators, such as money or food, are not only ineffective over the long term but are actually counterproductive. Children will lose interest and motivation when rewarded for something that they wanted to do anyway or for something that presents little or no challenge to them.
When disciplining your child for bad behaviour, explain to them the natural consequences of their actions, so that they can learn how their choices affect the events in their life. Focus on the behaviour and not on the child: “Hitting your sister is not acceptable” rather than “You are a bad girl for hitting your sister.”