Beyond ‘Just Try Your Best’: How to Foster Realistic Goals and Healthy Self-Worth in Kids
May 24, 2024
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Dr. Joshua Sparrow, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, discusses the importance of fostering realistic goals and healthy self-worth in children. Topics include embracing mistakes for growth, hidden eating disorders, promoting healthy self-assessment, navigating unrealistic expectations, and balancing parental influence with life's unpredictability.
Encouraging real competencies over external praise nurtures positive self-regard in children.
Understanding diverse motivations behind a child's aspirations guides effective parental support tailored to individual goals.
Shifting from 'try your best' to promoting realistic self-assessment fosters a healthier approach to learning.
Deep dives
Importance of Building Real Skills
Encouraging kids to build real competencies and skills rather than focusing on external praise fosters positive self-regard. Understandings why certain achievements matter to the child, whether for personal fulfillment, peer recognition, or academic success, helps align parental support with the child's motivations and goals. Recognizing the impact of internal and external pressures on children's performance allows for nuanced parenting that goes beyond simplistic encouragements like 'try your best.'
Navigating External & Internal Pressures
Parents navigating their children through external pressures, such as academic success for college admissions, peer comparisons, and internal drives, need to provide appropriate support and guidance tailored to individual motivations. Acknowledging the multifaceted reasons behind a child's aspirations, including academic, social, and personal growth, can lead to more effective parental involvement that addresses varied sources of pressure and expectations.
Challenging the notion of 'try your best' as a high-pressure standard, parents are encouraged to foster realistic self-assessment and growth mindset in children. Emphasizing that failure does not equate to lack of effort but may indicate areas for improvement or skill development provides a healthier approach to learning and personal growth. By avoiding extreme feedback loops of 'perfect' or 'failure,' children can cultivate positive self-regard and resilience.
Recognizing the balance between parental influence and external factors, like luck and individual temperament, allows for a more grounded perspective on parenting roles. Understanding that parents play a significant but not all-encompassing role in a child's development helps alleviate undue pressure and unrealistic expectations. Embracing the unpredictability of life's outcomes and focusing on resilience-building rather than absolute control fosters a healthier parent-child dynamic.
Disclosure of Parental Reflections and Growth
Reflecting on parenting approaches, acknowledging the impact of phrases like 'try your best,' and embracing the need for continuous self-assessment and growth supports ongoing parental learning. Engaging in discussions around parenting challenges, self-regard, and aligning parental intentions with child motivations reveals the complexity and evolving nature of effective parenting practices. Embracing vulnerability and openness to reevaluation allows for adaptive and responsive parenting strategies.
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Joshua Sparrow, child, adolescent, and general psychiatrist and associate professor or psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. We delve into how to help children develop realistic goals and positive self-regard, and why the common parenting phrase “just try your best” could actually be harmful.
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