There are a handful of concepts you can clarify to your tweens so that they tread on the right path while trying to self-improve.
One of the most important things you can teach your tween is to strengthen their self-improvement skills. It might sound like an easy job to teach self-improvement skills to your tweens, but it can be quite tricky for parents at times. You might also want to consider if you leave your tween to learn this completely independently, they might pick up the wrong cues. This can affect their functioning and emotional growth through the crucial phases of the teenage years and later in their adulthood.
There are a handful of concepts you can clarify to your tweens so that they tread on the right path while trying to self-improve. You might want to discuss concepts like success, beauty, and the like, to get your tween a clearer idea about the reality of these. You might want to show your tween that in the journey to self-betterment, what matters most is consistency in the long run. So, here is how you can strengthen self-improvement skills in tweens.
Promoting Self-Awareness & Acceptance
The first step is to help your child form their self-image. If your kid has no concrete sense of self, then they might not be able to listen to the voice of their hearts as it guides them. This could mean that your kid might remain lost in the many voices of others around them and struggle to become self-directed in their quest for self-improvement.
Self-awareness can be essential not only in identifying what the shortcomings in them are but also in recognizing their strengths. You can teach your child to believe that they have to accept their mistakes, weaknesses, and strengths to optimize them to master self-improvement skills.
Being A Coach To Your Child
You can be a constant support for your child instead of doing their activities for them. Under your supervision and guidance, your child shall feel safe and secure to decide their quest for improvement. Every time they go astray, you can help them come right back on track. One way to keep them focused is to concentrate on achieving one thing at a time.
“Experts recommend that instead of being overwhelmed by every area of your life that you want to improve or by all of our weaknesses, just pick one specific area to focus on, which is more likely to result in success,” as posted on Middle Earth.
You can help your kid focus on what they want to improve in themselves, but the choice should be theirs. It is also useful in instilling a sense of responsibility. Have your kid learn that it is the journey that matters the most while walking the road to self-improvement. If they enjoy the journey, they are bound to be successful and get the desired result.
Encouraging Positive Self-talk
It can be imperative to inspire in your child the habit of indulging in positive self-talk. The most effective method to do this is to model this kind of habit for your child by practicing it yourself. You can promote this as one of the many ways to indulge in self-care.
Your child can not only learn a healthy habit but also learn to be self-sufficient. This is another aspect that can boost the right kind of self-confidence in your tween that will help them acquire self-improvement skills. Positive self-talking is also an important lesson in problem-solving because your child develops the optimism required to deal with failure and strive for improvement. It also helps keep mental health problems at bay for your child.
“While it’s healthy to provide support and reassurance, your overall goal should be to help your child learn how to become a cheerleader for themselves,” writes Amy Morin, a psychotherapist, and editor-in-chief of Verywell Family.
Being Careful About Showering Praise
Being appreciative of your child’s efforts undoubtedly lifts their spirits and makes them more motivated and ambitious to improve. But you might want to be careful about what you are praising them for. For example, if your child scores the highest in the class for a science project, you might not want to emphasize topping the class. Instead, you can acknowledge their hard work and teach them that it is important to be diligent no matter what the result is.
It can be a lesson on what one can control and what one cannot control and can prove to be a vital lesson for your kid in the long run. So, when you praise them for their beauty, you might want to clarify that being a kind human being makes them beautiful and not just the physical traits that are out of their control.
Developing Social-Emotional Skills
The lesson on social competence and emotional intelligence can be related to your child’s self-improvement skills. You can have an ongoing conversation with your child regarding what they want to improve in themselves. If they only stick to self-centered things like their own scores or their performance in sports, then you might want to help them explore and expand their ambitions.
You can show them other areas with a larger scope that allows self-improvement and social-emotional skills. Please encourage them to reach out to those whom they think are isolated or bullied. This can help them better themselves. Also, ask them to throw litter in the dustbin if they find it in public places because that makes them better citizens and humans.
You can strengthen your tween’s self-improvement skills by teaching them never to give up. But alongside that, you can also keep training them in other basic skills like being punctual and efficient at time management. Following healthy eating and sleeping routines, amongst others, can also facilitate self-improvement in your tween.
Source: VeryWell Family, Middle Me Earth, Understood
