3 Successful Ways To Motivate Your Child
Do you think that your child is lacking the motivation to learn new things and do better at school? Do you have trouble encouraging your child to do his chores or start practicing sport? Try one of the following tips, which can be adapted to different problems and situations, making learning and doing chores more fun for your child.
Rewarding for even the smallest successes
Rewards are often presented as very weak motivational tools, but a lot depends on how these tools are used. For example, offering sweats as a reward for doing chores creates a strong connection between something sweat and the satisfaction coming from the act of achieving something important. Children, who acquire this sort of connection early on, will more likely continue to reward themselves with snacks and sweats also when they grow up. What are the best rewards for your child? This depends on your child’s interests, for example small items, which your child likes to collect can be used as a reward after completion of a larger part of the task. Your child can also receive points, which when added together can be exchanged for a reward of their choice. It is important to establish a system, which will allow you to reward also the smallest achievements of your child, without spoiling them too much. If your child sees that their actions meet with positive response they will be more eager to continue working towards the bigger goal.
Encourage self-motivation
It is great to motivate your child using clever means to achieve the results, but it is even better to teach the child to self motivate to achieve the goal. Your child should understand that the goal itself is a reward. How to achieve that? It has to start with getting to know your child better and understanding what they would like to achieve in life. Doing better at math might sound like the most boring thing ever, but without it your child could not become a scientist (and that is their dream). Regular exercising is painful, but it will make your child better at football. The more attractive and important for the child is the long distance goal, the more motivated your child is going to be.
Everything can be a game
Every parent knows that children love playing games, but only very few parents use the many opportunities that the game brings. If your child does not find particular activities interesting you can change their perception by presenting the same activities as a part of a game. Create a fairytale with your child as the main character of the story and present the challenges your child faces as parts of the story, which all lead to a happy ending. Children love to play characters, so it is a good way to catch their attention and convince them to focus on things they do not like doing. You can also use narration and terms typical for sport events and present the upcoming school tests or weekly chores as Olympic disciplines, rewarding your child with gold, silver or bronze medal for every achievement.
Also a lot of schools now use different interactive methods when teaching little kids. It is a proved fact that interactive and practical methods do much better than just theory. In recent years Singapore math methods became very popular in US schools. A lot of children have problems with mathematics and consider it being the most difficult discipline. Singapore methods that use problem solving tasks really work. Some parents use Singapore methods in homeschooling too. If you don't know anything about these methods you should go to one of Singapore math training websites that are available on the web.
Actually speaking about math, some people are sure that kid's math skills depend on IQ level, but according to recent studies observed by Huffington Post 'motivation to work hard and good study techniques, not IQ, lead to better math skills'. So yes, motivation to keep trying and upgrading your level is a key element of success. To say the truth this applies not only to math and not only to children.
The article was provided by Irina Kovalyova - social media marketer, Internet marketing lover and blogger working on different interesting projects.