Important work: Children should see the value of their work. Whatever they do, they must also appreciate the experience they have gained. I like this saying very much: Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
A meaningful purpose: Man is a spiritual being. If our only goal was to feed and continue our generation, what you are reading now would be meaningless. Human is looking for meaning. So, as we talked about in the previous pages, set goals for your children and make them valuable to them.
Goal sharing: You set goals for your child when she/he was a baby. For example; It’s like learning to dress up on her own. As time goes by, being part of the goal setting process will motivate them. For family goals, getting your child’s opinion makes the child feel needed. They like to see, hear and feel that they make a difference.
Positive insatiability: If you want to achieve a goal, you must “be hungry.” Insatiability is the one-word definition of motivation. The important thing is to use this energy effectively.
Appreciation: In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the need for appreciation precedes the need for self-realization. Everyone wants their work to be valued and appreciated. Show your children this, say it and make it feel.
Clear expectations: People are motivated when they know what to do. Motivation rises when goals, expectations and responsibilities are clearly understood. In one of the first studies on this topic, Rosen and D’Andrade showed that the motivation for success is very related to the way parents interact with the child. In one study, they gave children a difficult task to do while being watched by their parents. They asked the blindfolded children to build a tower of bricks as high as possible. Then they paid attention to how hard the children worked to build the tower and how much effort they made to raise the tower as much as possible. Thus, they would get an idea about the level of motivation for achievement of children. While the children were trying to complete the task, Rosen and D’Andrade, who closely observed the parents, found that the parents of the children with high success motivation were constantly praising and encouraging them. Parents of children with low motivation for success did not expect their children to be very successful and did not encourage them much. Encouragement and well-earned praise are much more effective than financial rewards in motivating children to do a job well. It is particularly useful to draw attention to the concept of well-deserved praise here. The extra compliments given to the personality of the children can cause self-swelling.
Ozlem – Inci Aktas
