Motivating your children to do an activity can be hard nowadays. Children are often to focused on cartoons, video games or music. As parents we sometimes become so caught up in wanting our children to just listen to us! Realistically, children do not always understand the purpose of why we are wanting them to do an activity and look at it as being work. Now if you felt that something was going to be just work, would you want to do it? Probably not but you would do it anyway. Remember that feeling that you would have if you were forced to do a task that you really didn’t want to do.
Children’s brains are not developed enough to understand logic and reasoning on the same level that you do. So, do you know what you have to do? Meet them where they are at! Approach them with a more simple, logic technique and make it fun! If you want your child to do something, pay attention to the tone in which you present the idea to them.
Here are a few tips to consider when motivating your child:
- Encourage children to learn about new things.
- Think about things that motivate you and how you usually respond. (Remember children mock their parent’s behaviors.)
- Provide them with choices so that they can get used to feeling empowered.
- Give love to them daily.
- Give them room to make mistakes. (Do you know someone who has never made a mistake? No, me neither!)
- Try not to repeat generational disciplining actions just because you experienced it.
- Understand that no two children are alike. Find comfort in seeing the difference between how you expect your child to be versus how they are.