Appreciate and reward good behaviour

Many children are self-motivated to be well-behaved and co-operative, but many are not. Positive feedback certainly gives children an added motivation boost. It builds self-esteem and encourages children to be more self-motivated like most adults. Parents who use rewards must remember that their goal is to have children who make good decisions. Using positive feedback gets things going in the right direction, then self-motivation takes over. Whenever you reward your child with an incentive, such as a gift, or an allowance, be sure to add a comment that causes your child to think about about doing the right thing.

Use phrases of encouragement like:

To point out strenghts and improvements:
"It looks like you have worked hard at....."
"You have really improved in...."
"Look at the progress you have made in....."

To show importance of hard work:
"Hard work is not always easy, but it's worth it."
"Working hard has good results."
"If you keep working hard, you'll probably get it."

To show trust:
"I know you can do it."
"I like the way you handled it."
"Knowing you, I am sure you'll do fine."

Focus on the positive behaviors and attitudes

We all want to find means and ways to improve our child’s behavior and self esteem- Positive feedback is your most powerful tool.

Positive feedback means using praise or incentives to encourage good decision making. It is not something new, but we often forget to use it. There are two ways you can use positive feedback; first to increase desirable behavior second to decrease undesired behavior.

It is easy to use positive feedback to encourage desirable behavior, simply look for good behavior. When it occurs, reinforce it. When your children are well behaved, or have done something good or what was expected of them, reward them with words of praise or encouragement, a hug or a privilege.

We like our children to share things with each other. When they share something, reinforce the sharing. You could say: “I like the way you are sharing.” “I see you have decided to share your toy today, that’s really nice/ good.”

Positive feedback is simple to use. The difficult part is to remember to keep looking out for the good behavior. Usually we notice only misbehavior in our children and take the good behavior for granted. We can strengthen good behavior by telling our children how much we appreciate it. Key is to focus on positive aspects of our child’s behavior and this takes practice. If we just increase our use of positive feedback and make no other changes in our parenting behavior, our children will start making better decisions.

Teachers as Role Model

The influence that Teachers have over children is something one has to experience. I remember an incident which show cased just that, I and my husband sat once with our elder son Jay and explained about the Sun being a star and planets in solar system.

After few weeks he learnt at the school about the solar system, he came home to tell me that Sun is the closest star to us. When I asked him who taught you all of this?, I was in for a shock when he mentioned his teacher. All the effort put on the weekend had just been credited to the teacher. As my son put it "You told me about Sun and planets, but my teacher taught me about Solar System, you never mentioned about comets."

Whatever the teacher says or teaches becomes a gospel truth, and this is true for most of the children. A good teacher just by being someone a child aspires to be, that is a role model, can put him or her on the right track for the rest of his/her life.

Teachers can do immense good to a troubled child if they are empathetic, gentle and have time and the inclination. Often teachers who are loving and caring are able to make a special place in the child's heart and are loved forever.

Children learn from their surrounding

The second way that children learn is by experiencing things in their surroundings. Our child’s surrounding contains us and other family members, playmates, people in and from neighborhood, classmates, teachers, biggest of all Television, movies, books, music etc. Learning by experience is different from copying, if our child touches hot food, he learns that hot food hurts fingers. He learns it by his experience not by modeling us.

Children behave to fit into their environment. If the environment rewards playing with dolls, children learn to play with dolls. If the environment rewards belonging to a gang, children join gangs. It is because of the environment that we see families who are doctors, artists, players, teachers, painters, for more than one generation. It is because of the environment that a doctor’s son becomes a doctor and brigadier’s son chooses to join the army, too.

Families that spend together stay together. Neighborhoods that foster harmony have children who play together nicely.

Gift from Parents - Respect

The greatest gift that parents can give their child is Love, which they express in countless ways: a fond facial expession, spontaneous demostrations of physical affection like a hug, pleasure in their children's accomplishments, comforting them when they are hurt, controlling them to keep them safe and to help them become responsible people.

It is from this lovingness towards parents that children go on to form all their positive relations in life - friends, teachers, spouses, offsprings, neighbours, and fellow workers. It is important the way children see us behave in adult relationships as partners. If a child sees his mother being beaten all the time by her husband, or sees his mother sacrificing all her pleasures for his or his father's benefit, his future partner may have tough time with him; and as a consequence, so will he.

Children gain trust in themselves from being respected - as human beings - by their parents. This self -assurance helps them to be comfortable with themselves and with all kinds of people, for rest of their life. Respect from parents is what teaches children to give respect to their parents in turn.

In fact, its a choice parents need to make because the demarcation is clear - life before the baby and life after the baby. Parents should rethink and re-shape their lives to make it a safer place for the child's pysche. There are times when we as parents do behave irrationally, irritably, and are not kind, lenient or forgiving. But all parents must take responsibilty for the kind of adults our children will grow up to be.

How to be a Good Role Model Parent?

Kids learn everything by seeing their parents do it.

Once I was travelling by sub-urban train in Mumbai, India. When the ticket checker asked the lady sitting in front of me about her son's ticket, she said, "He is not yet five". As soon as the ticket checker left, the boy who heard all this, said to his mother " But ma, last month only we celebrated my fifth birthday", the lady was quite embarrassed and gave a sheepish smile to all the fellow passengers. The rest of the journey, which took about an hour and half, became tough for the mother as the boy kept on asking her the reason for lying.

By telling a lie, the lady set an example to her child that you can save money by lying and lying is okay.

As we see from this incident a wrong example has been observed by the child, do you think he will tell the truth if he is found doing something wrong?

Another scene that gets played in our daily life is when you tell someone who has called for your spouse that he or she is not at home, when they actually are, reinforces the lie in the child's mind. For the child it is okay to lie as mom and pop do it everyday.

Parents in eyes of kids

What if we were put under the scanner by our kids?

What are our kids thinking about us?

How do they view us?

Do they think Oh! my dad is always busy, he has no time for me. My mom doesn't give me time, she goes to work and when she is home she is busy in the kitchen.

We are role models for our kids, they look up to us, they immitate us in their own sweet way. Every one loves a child as the child is innocent not influenced by the world.

Let us look at, how we can be good role models for our kids?

We don't need to get defensive when our child catches us misbehaving. We can take advantage of this situation and turn our discomfort in a learning opportunity. When we get caught using bad language, we should explain to the child that we were wrong, we made a mistake. We should take responsibilty for our outburst and not shift the blame on the other person. We should admit our error and apologize. If, we do that we teach our child/ren that we too make mistakes, but we are willing to take responsibilty and apologize too. This can set a right example of taking responsibilties and can act as role model for the child.

Instances like these can ensure that child understands that his parents are not super humans, they too tend to err, but are wise to accept it.

Imagine your child accepting a mistake of shouting at his friend.

Don't we always want our kids to be a better human being than us?

That's all for now.