I was watching an episode of Make Your Child Brilliant on TVO.
She was working with two children and their parents. The task was to put up a tent. The researcher wanted to observe how the parents supported their child in the task.
One family saw the task as fun, and worked together to put up the tent. The parents in the other family didn’t see themselves as “tent people,” and so for them the task seemed really difficult. Right off the bat they thought, “This is complicated. It’s going to be hard.”
Of course, the ones who had their tent up first were the ones who considered the task to be fun rather than complicated. In the second family, the daughter had some good ideas but stopped giving her input because she’d been given the message by her parents that “this is really hard.” As the researcher said, “Sophie’s not going to touch a tent, ever, ever again!”
The researcher said, “Children don’t know something’s complicated until somebody tells them that it is. If your child is trying to do something hard, don’t tell them that you think it’s difficult. You’ll be amazed at what they can achieve.”
If reading’s not really your thing, make sure you’re not passing along that message to your children. Let them see reading as a fun and exciting activity. And it will be.
