(This article is part of our series on Mindset.)

As you watch your child take on something new, how many of you silently pray “Oh gosh, please, please let him not fail”?

It’s the natural parenting instinct in us.

Most of us do this, even though we know that statistically, there is no way anyone can go through their life without failing a few times. And we do it in spite of understanding at some level that a few setbacks may actually be good for for our kids – to learn perseverance, grit, resilience; to build character and to feel a deep fulfilling satisfaction when they succeed.

So, given that our kids will fail at some time or the other, and failure is in some sense necessary for them (and that we have a very weak stomach for it), how can we respond appropriately in case of setbacks and failures, so we can teach our kids to deal with them effectively?

That is the question we will deal with today. [Read more…]

You’re a good parent. You want to help your kids grow up to be happy and successful. So, when you notice them doing something right, you jump in with praise and encouragement.

“Good job!”

“That’s brilliant!”

“You’re awesome! Way to go!”

But is all that encouragement doing what it’s supposed to? Does praising children this way send the right message?

Turns out the answer is, yes and no.

You’ve got the first part right – as parents we are our children’s first and foremost cheerleaders. Our children need to hear encouragement from us to go on to have a healthy level of self-confidence and eventually a healthy self-esteem.

The key however, is to understand what kind of praise is appropriate in which situation.

Think of praise as water. [Read more…]

(This article is part of our series on Mindset.)

Admit it. Irrespective of whether you are confident or not about your parenting, you wonder at times — am I parenting the right way?

Being a parent puts a lot of pressure on most of us. Raising kids is a responsibility that is both marvelously uplifting and crushingly stressful. Kids have this amazing ability to bring out the best, and the worst in us, in a heartbeat. We are pillars of strength one minute, and brought down to our knees by our weaknesses the next.

If you’ve been parenting for any length at all, you know that there is no one single parenting style or philosophy that can quite address the breadth of our aspirations or the depth of fears in its entirety.

So of course there isn’t one simple straightforward answer to the question of whether we are parenting the right way… and sadly, that often keeps us spinning our wheels.

Which is why, I find Brené Brown’s take on this in the book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, very captivating. In Brene’s words,

The question isn’t so much “Are you parenting the right way?” as it is: “Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?”

For many of us however, the answer comes up as “No”. Knowing all our flaws and imperfections intimately, many of us want much more for our kids and [Read more…]

How many of you woke up this morning thinking “I wonder what I can do today to undermine my children, subvert their effort, turn them off learning and limit their achievement”?

Not one of you, I bet!

Almost universally, what we parents want is — a) for our kids to grow up to be happy, healthy and well-adjusted in life and b) to find success in whatever it is they do. And we want to do our best to help them get there.

Yet, according to Dr. Carol Dweck, psychologist and author of the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, many of the the techniques we use to “help” our kids, boomerang. Often, we end up sending our kids the exact opposite message than what we intend to!

[Note: If reading the lines above gave rise to a sudden uneasy feeling in you and your fingers are twitching to hit the back button or close this browser page, hang in there. This article may be more helpful to you than you expected…]

The Big Idea

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