Motivation?! I'm not going to tell you anything new, nothing you don't already know. You're looking for tools you already have, instructional books you've read a million times. Take off the blindfold and tell me you don't know how to do it, that it doesn't resonate with you, that you haven't grasped these five tips every parent uses to motivate their children...
- Meet To your children, become the best observer, but really, come on! As parents, we tend to confuse the ideal with reality. We've thought so much about how we want our children to be that we've forgotten to read to them, to get to know them. Each one of them is unique, unrepeatable, and has different needs. We find auditory children who receive everything through the verbal channel, visual children who are perceptive sponges, and kinesiological children who need to do, experiment, try, and move to learn.
- Fun, If your child is having fun and is motivated, learning and growing in a holistic way, it will always be meaningful, and they will store it in their memory of positive experiences to recall as motivational snacks to pull out at any time. Stories, imagination, our experiences as children, curiosity, mystery, surprise, and magic color the most motivating experiences. In the adult world, with what we call maturing, we have lost many tools because we are creatures of routine, who don't play, aren't surprised, and are short on imagination. So grab the toughest sandpaper you can find and remove the rust and find all these characters that live inside us; otherwise, they will never be able to see them.
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Coherence In you, as a model, you cannot preach one thing and do another, sow a positive attitude, always at hand with your best smile, recognize your little one's effort without ever establishing comparisons and giving all the support they need because... two days ago they were taking their first steps and now you shout that you want maturity, independence, responsibility, good manners without giving them good models, be self-critical and grow as a person until you become like what you dream for them because you still have time when it comes to what is most important, make the most important thing the most important thing.
- Explain the why of things, show the error as an opportunity not as a failure, make them decide, challenge them to participate, to analyze the situations, the problems, the difficulties, the possible improvements they would make in family dynamics... Talk, talk and then talk, be the best communicator they have ever known.
- Movement and action. You have to move because movement is demonstrated by walking, walk with your child regardless of the destination, learn to stop at every corner without missing opportunities to share any moment, children in movement are imagination machines, robots of knowledge, tools of exploration and we fight against that entire army pulling on their arms because we have to reach the destination without enjoying the journey, you look for tools that you have every day just by observing how they move, how they breathe, how they look at us and how they create their model copy of ourselves.
Cristina Oroz Bajo