Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

the best” bubble that their parents inflated for them. The result: disappointment, hurt, and an actual loss of the sense of competence. Let me be clear here: The only way for children to build a true sense of competence is through firsthand experience that includes travails, triumphs, struggles, setbacks, and successes.
    So to reiterate, only your children can build their sense of competence. You can, however, do several things to encourage them to develop their own competence. First, you can give them opportunities in their daily lives to gain a sense of competence. Your family life is rife with situations that are just calling out for you to allow your children to “get their hands dirty” and find out what they are capable of.
    These daily experiences allow your children to develop specific competencies that will be helpful to them as they progress through childhood and into adulthood. These include dressing, eating, drawing, reading, cooking, doing chores, and interacting with others. These early competencies lay the foundation for the development of more complex capabilities later in life. Also, the more individual competencies children develop, the more they will view themselves as globally competent people, which will give them the confidence to explore their world, try new things, take risks, and persist in the face of obstacles and setbacks. In other words, competence begets competence.
    Second, you can be sure that they gain the most value from their experiences. You can help them to recognize their accomplishments (“You just swung on the monkey bars all by yourself.”). You can directtheir focus to the competencies that enabled those successes (“You really worked hard to hold on.”). And you can praise their accomplishments (“It must feel so good to have done that yourself.”).
    But you shouldn’t just focus on the successes, because, as every parent knows, as your children develop, they will experience far more failures than successes as they begin to gain competence; just think about the process of your children learning to walk. How you react often dictates how they will respond to those failures. If you show disappointment and frustration, they will judge their experience as negative, and it may cause them to be reluctant to try again in the future. Catie’s avoidance of riding her bike after my unhealthy reaction to her struggles illustrates this point powerfully. But if you are positive and supportive, your children will get the message that failure is okay and just a part of life.
    Allowing their children to be wrong or do something poorly is very difficult for parents who hold the mistaken belief that these experiences will hurt their children’s sense of competence and scar their little psyches. But children, like everyone else, will probably fail the first few times they try anything new. Plus, they’re little kids, so you wouldn’t expect them to do much of anything very well at first. Whether they do it well isn’t important, because success isn’t really the goal. Instead the goal is to develop their willingness to keep trying. And you can have faith that if your children continue to try at something, they will, sooner or later, achieve some degree of competence and success.
    Another mistake that parents make is that, after their children are unsuccessful when they first try something, they try to correct their children so they will succeed the next time they try (otherwise, their children will be further scarred by the repeated failures). But put yourself in your children’s shoes. How would you feel if you tried really hard at something and your parents jumped right in to show you that you did it the wrong way and how to do it the right way? Wouldn’t it irritate the heck out of you? Well, that’s how your children probably feel. And what message are you sending withyour rapid-fire intervention? That you don’t believe your children are competent enough to figure it out on their own. You may ask, but how are they going to learn to do it the right way? I assure you that they will most likely figure it out themselves over time, through practice or observation. When they do finally get it, they will own it and will make a big deposit in their competence “bank.” That’s not to say that you can’t lend a hand when they are struggling. But let them take the lead; if they really want your help, they’ll ask for it.
PRAISE
     
    Praise is a powerful tool for developing