How to Teach Your Child Perseverance
Persevering through complex tasks is among children’s most significant daily issues. When children feel challenged, overwhelmed, and frustrated, they may experience high anxiety levels or shut down completely.
You can assist your child in curbing these behaviors and feelings by teaching them perseverance skills. And below are ways you can teach your child perseverance.
Define Perseverance for Your Child
Find time to explain to your child that perseverance means hanging there until you finish a task and not giving up. Help your child recognize perseverance by giving them examples and praising them when they stick to a job and finish it.
Also, encourage your child to read books about perseverance to help them get a better perspective on what perseverance entails.
Start with Small Tasks
Begin with small and simple tasks so they can enjoy success and growth in every step forward. Have the aim of your child persevering through a job and not for them to have mastery, especially in areas that have been consistently challenging to them.
Give Them Frequent and Sincere Praises
Even if your child’s grade or performance is not excellent, finishing their paper on time should be worthy of your praise and attention.
An excellent way to communicate praise is by celebrating it with other people. It can be through casually mentioning in a conversation or over a phone how you are proud of them finishing a project. This will create a lasting impact, and they will most likely remember how it made them feel.
Set Reasonable Expectations
There is a long path of failure, success, self-discovery, and maturity ahead of your children. Keep your expectations small, as there is no rush to currently accomplish them.
For example, if your child has a problem with handwriting, set the expectation for the child to improve on writing. If the child focuses and pushes through, there will be some noticeable change.
Find the Lesson in Challenges
Train your child to see an opportunity to learn from a challenge. Not every situation should be judged with a pass or fail. A child living through a challenge or failure is an example of perseverance at its essence.
Teach Your Child to Plan Ahead
Show your kids the tools they need to complete tasks and ways they can organize the task from the beginning to the end. This will help them to avoid frantic meltdowns and to rush jobs.
Whether a simple to-do list or an outline for a school project, provide your child with the right tools at the right moment. This can make a big difference between your children shutting down because the work has gotten tough.
Showcase Your Child’s Growth
Showing your child how much they have improved and their progress will give them the strength to keep them going. Do this by saving a work sample from the beginning of a school year and showing it to them after some time to see the change and progress they have made. You can also pin good report cards or good projects to the refrigerator or a bulletin board to showcase your child’s accomplishments. This will help your child see that the hard work they have been putting in is paying off, boosting perseverance and never giving up.
Teach Your Child Cause and Effect
Children should know that some actions have inevitable consequences. Show your child that if they delay doing a task and do it when the deadline has approached, they will face high levels of stress, have the potential for having poor grades, and struggle with doing work with anxiety. Going through that experience will teach your child the effect of procrastination, and they will learn from it and change.
With that being said, the child will learn the importance of getting things done in a timely manner even when they may not feel like doing it at a given moment.
Have Your Child Help Others
Your child seeing they have the potential to assist others will make a difference. Recruit your child to volunteer at a living facility or shelter. The aim of this is to see if they can affect others positively.
Final Thoughts
Perseverance is an important skill to have. Therefore, you should use the above tips to help your child persevere.
