As parents and teachers, we long to see our children and students flourish in life. But if your home was like many others’ during this season, your child’s learning environment didn’t go quite as well as you might have hoped. Often, in these moments, we’re tempted to react, fix, and do whatever we can to eliminate failure from our kids’ lives-- and ourselves’.
At Thrive, we believe a few key ingredients can help build that meaningful learning environment. And truthfully, these might actually be more important than making sure our kid gets a perfect grade. Borrowing some language from Boundaries with Teens by John Townsend, here are four ingredients we find essential:
Love: Always communicate with unconditional love and hope, no matter the present situation in front of you.
Boundaries: Clearly define boundaries and expectations before things happen, don’t react in the moment. Boundaries help create healthy connections.
Freedom: Learning to allow our kids to fail at times, and then teaching them to fight through the failure, is one of the greatest gifts we can give them. We need to allow manageable moments of failure in our kids’ learning process. There’s no other process that produces grit than failure.
Consequences: Appropriate consequences for choices is vital. Responsibility creates freedom, but when kids aren’t responsible, freedom needs to be removed--for a time. This is a learning process and opportunity to invite them into a new level of maturity and help them design consequences with you.
Above all, we must try our best to be a non-anxious presence that never stops believing in change. And honestly, these aren’t always easy to do. It’ll actually take a lot of practice on our end! There are days I feel like I succeed in these. Other days, I need to apologize and be an example to my child of what it means to be gritty and fight through failure moments. But while we wait patiently for their growth and maturity, we can live with a vision for our children, not just moment to moment.
If this is a new idea to you we recommend reading The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Bryson.