Choose Your Words
Positive reinforcement is so vital. And let’s face it, we’re all human and sometimes it comes naturally. We’re having a great day, the kids are all behaving, you even went to the gym today so it’s easy to say encouraging things over our kids.
“Thanks for helping. I appreciate you” “I’m so proud of you” “You are so awesome at that”. And then there’s those other days. The ones where everything has gone wrong. You were up half the night with a teething baby, you’ve got six loads of washing to do. You can not for the life of you think of anything to cook for dinner apart from pasta and you’ve cooked that twice this week already. You need a shower and to wash your hair and for heaven’s sake you just need to go to the bathroom without anyone banging on the door after 2 minutes! Those are the days when it’s harder. You want to be grumpy and snap and not be encouraging or affirming and let’s face it sometimes we do give in to that or at least I do!
It takes strength and courage and sometimes pure determination to choose words of life at these times or to apologise if we haven’t. None of us are perfect and we all fail in this area but just as our words can bring life or death I know that they can bring peace and healing when that is needed. be quick to say sorry to your kids if you need to. they will respect you for it and what’s more, they’ll learn to say it themselves a lot more easily.
When Max was 9 he had a teacher who he loved and I loved her too! She was young and fresh into teaching, full of lots of creative ideas and fun ways of teaching. But I didn’t love her because of that. Every day when I picked him up from school she stood at the door and shook each child by the hand. If they were inevitably looking at the floor she would say “Max I’m up here” so they would look her in the eye. then she would say “Thanks for a great day” and if they did something particularly well she would add that too. I’ve never forgotten that and I know Max hasn’t too.
I wonder what a difference it would make if every night when our children went to bed we looked them in the eye and said “Hey thanks for a great day, you did this…..really well today”
Maybe we should all try it.
Louise x