Success Characteristics

I have been working with children for the past three years on developing success characteristics like confidence, raising self esteem, decision making you name it. yes it can be done. The children I met and worked with left a lasting impression on me. besides my children I could meet and interact with so many children who really moved me and helped me to understand them better.The openness they come in, the curiosity, the energy is really contagious. Each child was different in his behavior and actions. Some liked to be in a group and some enjoyed being left alone. some enjoyed doing things and some enjoyed introspecting themselves and relating things with themselves. some were expressive and some could not tell what is their need. some enjoyed coming and some hated to be in there.
So how did we do it ? mainly through interactions with the child . Its very important as to what kind of interactions you have and how does it go. For every interaction will end up in child coming to a conclusion about himself. For eg: If the child is unable to accomplish a task, and you as an adult / facilitator intervene will leave the child gaining or losing on a skill. Am I making sense. So if I tell the child or give him some kind of messages that he is not good at that or he always fails to accomplish you know what you are leaving the child with. On the other hand if you interact with the child at a level where you say that you can give it a second try, or maybe ask for some help, or try it in different ways we are leaving the child with a strong message that there are many ways to do something and that I need to keep persevering. See , as simple a interaction which can leave the child believing in himself or thinking himself to be failure. Chances are that the child will try to do the task again or end up feeling frustrated over the whole thing and feeling miserable when everyone is able to accomplish this.

I have observed that the environment, the interactions the child has with his adults, the modeling he sees around himself( very important coming from adults) and exposure to various things give shape to the child's personality. The child is like raw clay you can mold him the way you want. Hence it becomes very important as to what role you play. One thing to remember is that not to make the child confer into whatever you say, or make the child follow into whatever you want to do, rather understand what is the child meant to be doing, what is his natural inclination, what are his strengths, what is his journey ???? I once saw a child struggling in music class, no matter what he does he could not get the notes right. but his mother was very keen on getting his notes right. but if you were the child what could have you been your feeling. frustrated, incompetent, unsuccessful, a failure. Its very important to follow the child rather you leading the child. You can give him a platter and finally let the child to choose from the platter. Childhood is very crucial period in anyone's life. During this period if you happen to have various experiences , you would have formed a strong foundation , belief about yourself. These beliefs about one self form the operating system. Its very hard to shake them later. hence let the child make positive beliefs about himself like I am a trier, I am confident, I am lovely, sweet, everybody loves me... Then whatever may come your way in life you are equipped to face it. This is what the school must be teaching the children. Instead I see the children being put down, ridiculed, made fun of by the adults around. My daughter other day comes and tells me that the teacher called a child "cry baby". I was very sad. In fact my daughter was feeling terrible about this event. Now what are these teachers doing to the child ? They are not at all aware ! SAD. Many a times we give authority to somebody else to take charge of our children. Like the police man, any other adult around . We ask the police man or any other adult to shout at our children ? How can we do that ? What right we have got to do that ? just because we are parents we can do anything ?

Stop telling what the child should do, rather ask what the child wants to do.
Stop asking why , start asking HOW
Stop telling I say so, start asking how can we together...

We all fail to understand our children. But we expect them to understand us. That which the child does anyways.

Pain and Emotion

Have you ever observed yourself having a pain in some part of your body when you go through some kind of emotion. For eg: people visit the loo more often when they are having an exam. stomach upset when you are tensed or stressed . The co-relation between the body and the emotion is very obvious here. yeah right ! what do I do is the question now ?
As they say every pain ache and ailment is psychosomatic which means there is an emotional aspect to it. Address the emotional aspect and the pain gets addressed by itself most of the time.
Now you may say I am talking nonsense ? No, there is this technique called thought , feel therapy which does exactly this. In the US there is a huge market for this. It is acupressure for emotions. Very interesting and I am experimenting with it now.

Some times its so hard to identify the feeling itself. What is that I am going through ? Although only you know what is that emotion unfortunately we as part of growing up lost touch with our own feelings. We deny or suppress our feelings to an extent that it manifests itself into some other form of pain. We are not taught to identify or even relate to it. Its a taboo in our society. When a child cries we first ask the child to stop crying or we label the child as a cry baby , for all the child is doing is just expressing his emotion he is going through. We say a person who can mange his emotions is more balanced. Is that right ? So are we all balanced or imbalanced or immature. I am not sure about that. I have observed that we take a back seat when we see someone going through a bad emotion. We get uncomfortable with that feeling.

We don't know what to do with these feelings of mine . I can't make it go away, its there . Then as smart intelligent people we try to distract or rationalize our feeling by telling myself that oh Ok I am dumb why should I feel so, maybe he didn't intend to hurt me. but if you see the damage is done what about that? who is taking care of that ? Is that helping you to have a normal relationship with that person? Doesn't that feeling pop up saying that person made you feel that ? how can you forgive ? All these even after you have rationalized !!

What happens because of all this is we are no more ourselves ? We don't express or many a times we start avoiding such situations or people. I loose touch with my SOUL. The true love , compassion gets masked. I become uncomfortable being with some people for I cannot be ME. Am I right? If you see a child you see how happy he is wherever he is. His SOUL is pure and not yet masked by prejudices, emotions , judgements as of now. But don't worry we will train him to be like us soon. How sad !

Child And His NEEDS

Somebody once asked me how do you know what your child needs ? How do you decide on a school ? yeah, its tough but in general you know the inclination of your child. What is it that he enjoys? What is it that he likes most? What are the things he can do best ? Then when you ask him questions as to how does he do that he will tell you what goes on in his mind and how he/she does it? I once asked my daughter how can you remember the meaning of a word in hindi when she has seldom heard the word and reading it only once. She told me mamma its very easy for me, the page gets printed in my mind and I scan the page for the word and then I know! Very visual. This is called picture memory. Now does this work for all subjects ? How about maths? Now maths can get tough for her as only remembering will not help her here. She needs a different method to process the information. She needs to be given more pictures/charts/ to process the information which she can do well.

One more thing we need to question about studies is that , If he enjoys doing so many things and why is that he is not enjoying doing something or some subject? Its like if I like to eat so many vegetables then why is it that I don't like some vegetables. It may be because it tastes bad, smells bad, looks bad or simply presented bad. The same vegetable presented in a different way may appeal to you isn't it? That's how it works with children and their studies also. The way it is presented should appeal to the child. You may have heard children saying Maths is hard/hindi is tough? why? question them and you would know exactly what is it that they find hard in it?

If you ask your child questions whenever you are working with them you would understand how is it that he/she is processing the information. Whats his style of thinking ? You need to understand that. Its hard but by questioning you can understand and you will soon realize why some things sound so easy for him and some things are tough for your child.

Finally give more of that to your child what he enjoys and harness his strengths more . This will not only make your child confident, happy , later he/she will enjoy his life doing things he likes to do most .

Now with this understanding I set out to find the school. How is the school giving this information to the children? Are the children able to process it ? If not then there is a mismatch the way it is presented and the way the child generally sees.

I have always asked this question to myself as to what should be the vision of the school? Generally it is not a shared vision between the school and the child. The school aims at scoring 100% results. But what about the child and his needs ? Is it being satisfied ? We as parents get carried away with the scores. But if you reflect back at your own way of schooling you will realise that the school didn't give you much in terms of building confidence in you, giving you the joy of learning, becoming resilient, mainting focus , become a decision maker ? I vouch on it. Suddenly when we are thrown out of school and into the world to make a living we generally fail for we have lost touch with our strengths? Sooner or later we loose interest in what we are doing for maybe thats not what I enjoy for all you know ! I am a living example. Did I like programming ? was that my strength ? sorry ! no it wasn't. It was very stressful for me. Then why did I do my masters ? etc etc. I don't know, I just followed without taking stock of what I am really good at you see. I did do well in that field because of all my other strengths within me.

So as parents or adults around a child become aware of the child's strengths. If the child is doing something focus on the process. Ask him as to How is he doing it? understand his strength. This will help the child understand himself. Make a list of your child's strength and make him aware of that too. Our society is so much focussed on the results that we forget the process. Its not important that we arrived at an answer but its important to see HOW we arrived at an answer.

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There are so many thoughts floating by now-a-days so thought of documenting it somewhere . mostly for self.