Effective Parenting Skills - Encouragement is the Seed of Success

If you are a parent, of course you want your children to do their best. However, what kind of parent are you? Do you encourage your children, or do you intimidate them? If you encourage your children, you stress that they should work toward a certain goal. If you intimidate your children, you stress that they should win at all costs. Especially if you tell your children that they should win, it means that the results, not the effort or intention, are what count.

Of course, this is not healthy and can cause you to have very unhappy children. In extreme cases, it can even lead to suicide. We have all heard of the honor student who does not make top honors and therefore commits suicide. In less extreme cases, such a student may become an underachiever just to avoid even trying and failing. In either case, this kind of stress causes not success, but failure or even worse.

You may have a child who is obsessed about becoming the "best" even at the expense of others. By contrast, you may have a child who is completely immobilized or paralyzed by fear of failure and won't even try. Therefore, the best way to circumvent this situation is to focus on encouragement and on having your child be happy and well balanced rather than on being a "winner" or being "successful" in the traditional sense of the word.

Although praise is a good tool to use intermittently, by far the more important tool is encouragement. If children are praised for everything they do, even failures, they become confused when they get out in the real world and are not similarly compensated for their efforts or lack thereof. Therefore, a careful balance of encouragement coupled with an expectation that the child will put forth the very best effort possible, is what is necessary.