There are 1000s of ways, everyone is doing their own things and everyone is wishing for the best - who is right? Some are sending their kids to private schools, some are just saving that money in a bank and giving them when they are older. Some send their kids to lot of classes, some are just chilled, Some give their kids only organic food no candies, some give their kids lot of sugar. Some let their kids do only things they like and some ask their kids do things what parents want and is needed. Some will scold their kids some will just use soft words. Who is right?
My conclusion was everyone was right. Each type of bringing up will benefit the child in some circumstances and not in others. Every situation and every decision seems to have both positives and negatives. And depending on how life turns out, different people will benefit out of it.
For example
Strategy 1 - These people believe - Give your child every oppurtunity possible. This type of kid will get such a big leg up in its career, it starts where other kids will take years to reach, so success is almost guarenteed. On the other hand how will they learn to appriciate hardwork if parents made everything easy for them? Wont they buckle at the first failure?
Strategy 2 -Tough love. Parents decide that the child will learn more if they make it hard for the kid. This child will learn to be resilient and deal with lot of situations but may become hard and build resentment towards parents? be tought with others who may see it negatvely.
Another striking example was - today kids who are brought up by kind caring parents are doing very well for themselves, kids who are left to take care of themselves are getting into gangs and having a miserable life. No question about it that kind parents are doing better right? but What if - tomorrow war breaks out and situation turns out like in Syria or Congo or something? And their parents and relatives die? Who will do better in that chaos? Right? Every upbringing possibly has a silver lining - almost every one.
I have always felt, kids with tricky parents learn to navigate around other people better, kids with nice parents have to learn to deal with bad people at an older age and it is harder.
I gave this a lot of thought, What can they teach their kids which will help how ever the circumstances turned out. So It has to be more of an attitude than skills, It has to be very fundamental .
For me it boiled down to only one thing which may give the kids best advantage in life no matter what.
Growth mindset and hence Resilience and the Belief that they can handle it.
If they teach kids to enjoy learning, to make them believe in improvement and learning instead of belive in god given/parent given gifts? get up after falling down, Enjoy failing, learning to look for new way to get out of a jam. What else is there? Life is a series of jams, the one who enjoys getting out of them - will be happy. They may become mechanic or become CEO of a multinational but they will not bow down, They will be happy. No one can control what happens to them, we can control how we react, we can teach how to react.
In any situation - they should think ok what can I do from here, Instead of thinking oh my god this has happened to me.
Even in happy situations, Same, instead of gloating in their success. They will think that was awesome so what I do from here. What can I learn, How can I improve.
When someone is better than them, they shud instinctive learn from the betters rather than compare and feel small . When some one is worse then them, still learn - why are they like that. and that will help improve ( helping people who are worse is not part of growth mindset, they may do it or not, but learning for self improvement is )
Isnt that the ultimate gift?
Same thing applies to me as well
It doesnot matter what decision I take in life, It will all have positive and negative consequences, there is no perfect solution but if I approach the situation with growth mindset, that is enough.
Inspired by books:
No comments:
Post a Comment