Five steps to raising an optimistic child
Why should you want your child to be an optimist? Because pessimism (the opposite of optimism) is an ingrained habit of mind that has sweeping and disastrous consequences - a depressed mood, resignation, under-achievement and even, unexpectedly, poor physical health.
Children with optimistic thinking skills are better able to understand failure, have a stronger sense of personal mastery, and are better able to recover when things go wrong in their lives.
How parents can help:
Step 1: Learn to think optimistically yourself. What children see and hear indirectly from you as you live your life and intermingle with others influences them much more than what you try to ‘teach’ them. You can model optimism for your child by incorporating optimistic mental skills into your own way of thinking. With practice, almost everyone can learn to think differently about life’s events - even parents.
Step 2: Teach your child that there is a connection between how they think and how they feel. You can do this easily by thinking aloud with them about how your own thoughts adversely create negative feelings in you. For example, if you are driving your child to school and a driver cuts you off, verbalise the link between your thoughts and feelings by saying something like, “I wonder why I’m feeling so angry? I guess I was saying to myself, now I’m going to be late because the guy in front of me is going so slowly. If he is going to drive like that, he should not drive during rush hour. How rude”.
Step 3: Create a game called ‘thought catching’. This helps your child learn to identify the thoughts that flit across his or her mind. These thoughts, although hardly noticeable, greatly affect mood and behaviour. For instance, if your child received a poor grade ask, “When you got your grade, what did you say to yourself?”
Step 4: Teach your child how to evaluate automatic thoughts. This means recognising that what you say to yourself (about yourself) is not necessarily correct. For instance, after receiving the poor grade your child may be telling himself he is a failure, that he is not as smart as other kids are and so on. Many of these self-statements may not be accurate, but they are ‘automatic’ in that situation.
Step 5: Teach your child how to produce more accurate explanations (to themselves) when bad things happen and use them to challenge your child’s automatic but inaccurate thoughts. Part of this process involves looking for evidence to the contrary (good grades in the past, success in other areas, etc). Another skill to teach your child to help him or her think optimistically is to ‘de-catastrophise’ the situation, that is to help your child see that the bad event may not be as bad or will not have the damaging consequences imagined. Few things in life are as devastating as we fear, yet we blow them up in our minds. Parents can influence the thinking styles of their children by modelling the principles of optimistic thinking.