How to help your child be successful

The start of a new year is a good time to take stock and think about the future, on our own behalf as well as on behalf of the others in our lives. As parents and teachers, we often wonder what we can do to help the children and young people in our care to be more successful. There are many definitions of success but for the purpose of this post, we will focus on success from a psychological perspective, i.e. in terms of traits including mental toughness, resilience, social competence, self-awareness and moral strength. There is much research indicating that people who are successful in their fields demonstrate these traits and apply them to situations both when things are going well, as well as when they're not. 

The good news is that rather than being inherent, these traits can be developed by acquiring a specific set of skills. Educational psychologist Michele Barba (2021) realised through working with vulnerable children and young people that those who became successful in adulthood had adopted a number of specific skills which separated them from those who had struggled.

So what are those skills, and how can we help children and young people acquire them?

1. Self-confidence

Parents often equate boosting their children’s self-esteem with raising their confidence, but there is little evidence to indicate that boosting self-esteem increases a child’s academic success or even their happiness. We know that children and young people who attribute their success to their own efforts and strengths are more successful than those who think they have no control over their outcomes. In order to become confident, they have to face obstacles and find ways to overcome them - it’s hard, but this means that as parents and educators we must allow  our children learn what happens when things go wrong, so that they can learn what to do. As Madeline Levine explains, parenting styles which shield children from adversity and challenge  will "set up circumstances that will nurture distress today and will exacerbate it tomorrow." 

2. Empathy

Children and young people who demonstrate empathy towards others are able to label and recognise their own and others’ emotions, consider how emotions present in themselves and other people and can communicate and share their feelings appropriate for their age and stage of development. The term ‘empathy’ can be categorised into the following three types: affective empathy (sharing another’s emotions), behavioural empathy (acting with compassion) and cognitive empathy (understanding another’s thoughts and perspective). Parents and educators can help children and young people become empathetic by naming and talking about emotions, encouraging conversation about feelings and situations they are experiencing and helping them to notice signs of emotional states in the people around them via their facial expressions and their body language. 

3. Self-control

A person’s ability to appropriately control their attention, emotions, thoughts, actions and desires is highly correlated to their success as well as their resilience. A number of longitudinal studies have shown that young children who show self-regulatory behaviours go on to experience more success in school and are more likely to avoid risky behaviours in adolescence than their peers who found self-control more difficult. In order to help children and young people learn self-control, parents and educators should encourage them to become better listeners, learn to focus their attention, persist in learning tasks, and interact in more positive ways with peers if they think about and aim to control their actions. Ways they can do this include establishing clear routines and expectations, clarifying boundaries and encouraging prosocial behaviours through which they learn to take others’ feelings and needs into account. It may be helpful to allow ‘stress pauses’ which teach ways of thinking things through before acting, such as “count to 10 before you respond” or “don’t say anything about them you wouldn’t want to be said about you.”

4. Integrity

Integrity, the quality of being honest and having a strong set of moral principles, is a set of learned attitudes and skills that help children understand the difference between right and wrong and apply these in their own lives. As parents and educators, its important to make our own expectations clear as well as allowing them to develop their own individual perspective. Ways adults can do this include talking about and teaching their own family and community values as well as discussing alternatives, developing a inclusive vocabulary, encouraging, praising and rewarding respectful behaviour, exploring consequences and differences, and responding consistently. 

5. Curiosity

Curiosity is the recognition, pursuit and desire to explore new, challenging and uncertain events and it is closely linked to resilience in terms of ‘bouncing back’ and becoming successful after setbacks. Parents and educators can encourage curiosity in a number of ways. These include introducing small changes to established routines, to give the idea that alternatives are possible, as well as the use of positive and unexpected surprises. It's really important to let children and young people explore things that are of interest to them, while of course ensuring that they are safe and appropriate boundaries are maintained. Offer open-ended tasks and activities and challenge them to make something creative or unusual. Give them time to investigate, potter and tinker and allow them the time and space to formulate their own questions and to test them. Rather than offering answers to their questions, model your own inquisitiveness with comments like “what do you think?” “how can we find out?” and “let’s see what happens!”

6. Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is one in which a person believes that they can improve their ability and performance through increasing effort and with hard work. They do not consider failure as a permanent condition and strive to grow and learn, even in the face of failure. It is the view that mastery is possible if we keep trying, keep taking chances, and work toward improving. Carole Dweck (2015) commented that “people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” Strategies to help children and young people develop a growth mindset can be found here.

7. Resilience

Learning ways of persevering when faced with challenges and how to bounce back after setbacks are essential skills to have in one’s resilience toolkit. The real challenge is learning how to carry on even when things aren't looking great, and especially after we fail. Mistakes and setbacks can derail success and resilience requires practice, persistence, and a healthy dose of bravery. There are ways to increase resilience at any age, but just as with any skill, the sooner the skill becomes embedded, the better.  Resilient children become resilient adults who experience less stress and are more successful, as they are better equipped to cope with life’s pressures and bounce back from challenges. Ways that parents and educators can build a culture of resilience can be found here.

7. Optimism

People who are optimistic are more resilient, tend not to give up in the face of challenge and interpret experiences in a way that gives them a feeling of confidence and control. They view challenges and obstacles as temporary rather than final and able to be overcome, so they are more likely to succeed. To help children and young people take on a more optimistic outlook, there are a number of things parents and educators can do. These include being a positive role model by modelling an optimistic outlook, and helping them to interpret failures as opportunities by asking them to think about what they would do differently next time. Challenge their negative explanations of a situation by encouraging them to come up with different reasons as to why something happened. If they are anxious about failing, support them to set their own goals and set out the steps to take towards them. 

If you found this post interesting, you might also like to look at our other blog posts on related topics including growth mindset, moving on, resilience, self-regulation and mindfulness.