You want to set your child up for success. You strive to do all the right things. Inevitably, you find yourself falling short and seeking others’ input. Maybe that’s why you’re here. Or, perhaps you feel a sense of accomplishment in child rearing and are curious to hear new ideas. Either way, there are principles and practices which provide a roadmap to set your child up for success later in life.
In this post on how to set your child up for success, we will focus primarily on practices. If you’re interested in reading about principles, see our posts entitled Holistic Education: The Human Embedded in the 4 Kingdoms of Nature and How to Bring Waldorf Into Homeschooling.
So, let’s get into this.
Tip 1: Praise Effort More Than Outcomes
Effort is a verb, a process that keeps children striving. Outcomes are nouns by which they measure their worth. Nouns are fixed while verbs are in motion. Keeping your child’s soul in motion is the resilience-granting gesture. On the other hand, when they descend into defining themselves according to outcomes, one of two things happens. Either they feel they are inadequate when they fall short, or they become egotistical in their success. Even if they are the latter, it is a brittle position from which they can always fall from grace.
To protect them from that, you want them continuously striving for excellence, no matter what they have or have not yet achieved. It’s the striving, not the outcome, that matters most. So, instead of, “Nice job winning that match,” it’s more like, “You played hard, and it was inspiring to watch.” Or, if they lost the game, it’s something like, “You played hard and they played hard, too. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but if you keep working at it, you will excel eventually.” Carol Dweck’s book Growth Mindset is a great read to understand the psychology behind this.
Tip 2: Give Them Invigorating Challenges
As a parent or homeschooler, we have to acknowledge there is no growth without challenge. Consider how the muscles of your body grow when challenged with weight bearing exercises. The soul is no different. A proper child rearing does not make life always easy-peasy for them. The trick is to find the right balance of challenge that invigorates them without being so hard it crushes motivation. For example, if your child has mastered walking a balance beam, make them do it backwards. If they master that, make them do it heal to toe. Then, add some distraction or make them do it while juggling beanbags and balancing a weight on their head. Continuously push the envelope of their abilities and they will later thank you for it. In my many years of teaching, I always pushed the children with greater potential harder. As I often tell students, “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It may actually mean there’s something quite right with you.” That’s the attitude we want our children to feel.
The other side of this is to model meeting challenges yourself. For example, let’s say you undertake a practice of fasting two days a month in the effort to remain healthy. You don’t ask your children to do this, but them seeing you do it gives them a picture of inner human strength. We can accomplish much by modeling the virtues we wish to see in our children. Conspicuously practicing the principles of success yourself is one of the secrets to set your child up for success.
Tip 3: Make Sure They Work with Their Whole Being
Modern Western education overemphasizes the head to the detriment of the heart and limbs. However, a proper understanding of child development shows how thinking develops from the periphery inwards. In other words, what children do with their hands and fingers, feet and toes as children becomes their thinking later in life. One of the most striking examples of this comes from the biography of Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman. As a child, his parents kicked him out of the house all day until dinner time. There was a junkyard out back, and he would go there and tinker with things for hours, taking them apart, putting them back together, creating new things, etc. Everything he did with his fingers as a child became his adult ability to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.
It’s not that academic learning is unimportant – it is. It’s just not the whole story. They need activities that make them work with their limbs like knitting, woodwork, playing musical instruments, the various arts, etc. They also need activities that engage their feelings – even within the academic process. That’s why storytelling and arts are so vital to education.
That’s also why we offer an invigorating, yet artfully engaging, homeschool curriculum for grades 5-8 and some for 9. It is a place where we put the above principles into practice. As one child said in class yesterday about our Creative Writing Class, “It’s very rigorous but very enjoyable.” We offer all the academic blocks plus English through Creative Writing and Teen Empowerment classes. For free sample lessons, visit: https://enkindleacademy.com/free-sample-lesson.
Tip 4: Model Emotional Self-Control
Our children learn more from what we are than what we say. If you want self-possessed children later in life, the best thing you can do is become self-possessed yourself. Do not underestimate how much they learn from what we are. When you exhibit mastery over your own responses from when your children are a young age, they will emulate this.
Now, as a disclaimer, you’re not going to be perfect at it, so don’t hold yourself to that expectation. However, striving for the ideal is what matters. Measure yourself by the verb, not the noun, so to speak.
Reinforcing emotional intelligence with trusted mentors outside the home also helps. Middle schoolers often want to hear what you are telling them from somebody else. That’s why we offer a weekly Teen Empowerment class where students practice these resilience-building skills directly. One of our students from that class recently said, “I think it’s fun when we set goals every week and if you achieve them you really feel like you’ve done something and it feels good.” We created this class to meet adolescents and teens at just that time when they are questioning even the most idyllic childhood. For more info, visit: https://enkindleacademy.com/live-teen-empowerment-class.
Tip 5: Study Your Child
Perhaps the most important factor to set your child up for success is to steward them into self-knowledge. To know and possess oneself is the greatest treasure in human life. Yet, children only gradually come into themselves. Anthroposophy and modern neuroscience converge in their understanding that the self only fully incarnates – and the brain fully matures – between the ages of 21-28 (Steiner, 1965 & National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2023).
How, then, are children to guide themselves before this time? They do it through you. In turn, how are you to know what’s best for them? If we as caregivers merely thrust our own ideas on our children, we miss who they really are. The only way to know our children is to study them on their own terms. This requires that we silence our judgments about what is best and let the child’s being speak to us.
To love our children is to know them. Warm feelings, hugs, and gifts are not enough, important though they are. The greatest gift we can give our children is giving them our undivided attention with complete devotion, pondering their riddles and intuiting creative ways to meet them. For example, let’s say your child is hitting. Is the best approach to just ask him to stop over and over again? Good luck with that one. Perhaps there is something he needs to express with his hands that he’s not getting the opportunity to. Maybe he needs more chores involving moving heavy objects. Perhaps he’s showing a great deal of strength that he needs to learn how to channel in constructive ways. We cannot arrive at creative solutions through judgment, only through humble, devoted observation and patient intuiting. If you want to set your child up for success, know your child.
The Gift of Setting Your Child Up for Success
If we do this right, we’ll see our children thriving later in life. Families who follow the above principles see good results in time. As a side note, the most thriving young adults I’ve met were all homeschooled which is why I do what I do. There is something in giving children time and space to play, invigorating challenges, and the presence of emotionally intelligent parents that allows them to become fully themselves. That’s the greatest gift.
Our children deserve our best effort to ensure their success. While not everything depends on us as parents, there is a great deal we can do to steward their success later in life, and it starts by working from the principles of child development.
How to Connect
Enkindle Academy inspires young minds using a regenerative, Steiner-based approach to homeschooling. We offer prerecorded and live lessons for students in grades 5-9, encouraging students to deepen their reverence for nature and the living reality that permeates it. We teach all academic subjects plus creative writing and language arts, empowerment groups for teens, and soon to add fine arts.
Signup for a free sample lesson now.
References
- Steiner, R. (1965). The education of the child in the light of anthroposophy (GA 34). Rudolf Steiner e.Lib.
- National Institute of Mental Health. (2023). The teen brain: 7 things to know. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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