Successful Children- 5 Ways to Motivate Your Children to Succeed

We all want to ensure that we have successful children. With Holidays around the corner, and the weather getting cooler, your kids may be losing their get up and go gumption. Many children tend to lose their motivation to succeed, do homework and all of that jazz during the holidays, simply because they are anticipating time off. 

5 Steps to Successful Children

Teach the Value of Feeling Accomplished

In order to turn your unmotivated child into a motivated child, they must first understand the value of feeling accomplished. Consider positive reinforcement techniques or praise for a job well done. If they won’t start on a school project or homework with that type of encouragement, then have them sit at the table with the notes until they realize there’s nothing else to do. Along the path of them working on their school work peek in and make note of anything that stands out as pretty awesome. Encouraging words will help your child start to feel self-accomplished and in turn, they will feel that inner drive to succeed.

Use the “When You” Rule

A lesson all adults have learned the hard way is that they don’t get the reward until their job is done. This holds true with children. Start to enforce the “when you” rule, meaning the child doesn’t get to have fun or get anything special until they have completed the task at hand. This works well for success in homework and chores. Whether it’s a when you finish homework you can have electronics or a when you get your work done you get a good grade, these are all ways to motivate your child to succeed. The “when you” rule will teach your child the positive results that happen when they are motivated to succeed.

Identity Triggers and Weakness

Children, just like adults, have weaknesses or trigger points. When a child is struggling with a certain topic in school or completing a chore that you have requested they may not speak up citing their difficulties. Personally, this is somewhat of a pride thing or inability to properly communicate. Be sure to identify any triggers or weaknesses your child has so that you can curb those and work upon building the weakness into a strength. Remain respectful, positive and firm in how you approach open communication. In order to truly motivate your child to succeed they will have to feel confident they can trust you to confide in when having struggles.

Overall the job of a parent is to learn their child and how they work. As a parent, you can often times learn more about your child simply by watching them during chore and homework time. You will learn what seems to remove motivation and what they thrive doing. You can then use this information to tweak it in a way that motivates your child to succeed in all areas of their life by keeping open communication, using the “when you” rule and being there with positive reinforcement. These are all key strategies to help mold successful children, and remember our definition of success for our children can mean different things! As long as you are a happy family, that is all that really matters.