Children, the joys of our lives. Unfortunately, from the moment they are born, they come with as many trials and tribulation as joy.
They don’t come with a manual and there are no instructions that I could find anywhere.
The big anxiety for every parent, is how do you take that little baby and grow it into a fully developed and balanced human being?
And of course, there are some of us who put a little extra pressure on ourselves in that we decided to not only be responsible for developing the human being, we also decided to take responsibility for their education through home schooling.
So, for this to work, we need to find a way to develop a holistic growth map for these kids and deliver that as best we can.
What does holistic growth mean? How do I support and assist my child along the way to become a fully balanced individual who is ready to take on the world?
Research shows that the developmental journey for a child is basically divided into two main phases. The first phase, which starts from birth to the beginning of the teenage years, is focused on developing different aspects of the child. Then, when they do come to the teenage years, the foundation is there to start focusing on developing the growth mindset for them.
That is quite a mouthful and just thinking of how to do that in between everything else we as parents put on ourselves sounds quite daunting. It feels like the solution may be to just let them gorge on social media while you climb back under the duvet.
Really though, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Many generations have survived before us, albeit not always progressing humanity, and the majority still makes a positive difference. It also means that there are so many resources and examples out there that we can take from that we never have to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch.
So, how do we use day to day tasks and activities to create automaticity in our kids? Automaticity being the process where their behaviors, thoughts and emotions become automatic because they have ingrained it through repeated practice and exposure.
In my personal view, this is the easiest way to create a holistic growth roadmap: you decide the outcome you want, look at the different areas of development, and build in actions and activities which form part of day-to-day life.
Let’s look at how to do this practically.
To begin we must have an outcome in mind. Our focus as parents is in developing a well-rounded, capable, and confident young adult.
And so we start with pre-teen children. Here you have the opportunity to use as many fun and play activities as you can to work on different areas of development. Play with them!
Different development areas:
Physical Development:
No matter what our age is, we know that movement every day is good for health, longevity and growth. It gives the brain oxygen and releases happy hormones into our bodies. Start this early with your kids. Make them move every day. This could be anything, from a walk with the dogs, to an organized team sport. Take part in whatever you can with them. They will not only learn from you in that way, but behaviors will be copied and they will remember the play days for the rest of their lives.
Social Skills Development:
Social skills development is all about connecting with other people. Children need to have the skills to share, cooperate with others, actively listen and absorb information, be able to take direction, understand and respect others’ personal space, and make eye contact.
A good way of developing all these skills is creating a little project where your child needs to work with someone else in creating a final product. This could be a gardening project, arts and crafts, or even give them a simple scientific problem which they need to solve by working together, coming up with a solution and presenting the end result to you.
As they progress and you see progress, you can make the tasks a little bit more challenging every time to ensure that there is consistent growth in how they connect.
Emotional Development:
This is probably an area where most parents fall down many times. Here I am talking about managing emotions, having empathy (and understanding the difference between sympathy and empathy).
How do you ensure you teach your child to manage their emotions when you as an experienced adult can sometimes struggle to deal with traffic jams, loadshedding, taxis, potholes, corruption – the list goes on?
In my opinion, open communication channels are the most important thing here. Make it a daily conversation of why your child (and you) acted in a certain way that day. Why did you react the way you did? Which emotion should you have shown, if any, and what was the reason for you reacting in a certain way?
In most of our daily interactions and our reactions to those interactions, empathy can come into play. Often, the situation and emotions attached to it could have been improved if we reacted by being more empathic.
It is also important to discuss the consequences of the emotions we have shown and how the consequences could have potentially been more positive if we showed a different emotion in the situation.
Intellectual Development:
This area sometimes receives the most attention in our journey as homeschool parents, however, we don’t just want to fill their brains with facts and figures and make them memorize as much as possible. That is not intellectual growth.
Intellectual growth is developing their cognitive abilities through critical thinking and problem solving as well as stimulating creativity.
In younger kids this can be done through play activities. Problem solving (incorporating creativity) can be added to any play activity.
As they get older, they need to learn the facts and figures as stated, but you should still incorporate the problem solving and creativity.
An example would be: instead of making them write you an essay – give them a theme or a challenge and they need to bring you a self-developed comic book, movie, illustrated children’s book or a food recipe.
A recipe can also be used to incorporate scientific and mathematical principles in the process.
Show them intricate artwork and let them write a story about what they see and experience when looking at it.
Spiritual Development:
All the other areas of development should be underpinned by a strong sense of morals and values. They need to understand the difference between right and wrong and the most important way to grow this in your child is let them see your morals and values – your principles, what you allow and what you will not tolerate.
This is the one area where we can’t say do as I say, here it is all about them seeing every day what you do and emulating that.
It is important for them to understand your why, so have conversations where they can challenge your why and make them understand that their why will be the compass for their own morals and values.
Coming to the teenage years we have now had a few years of holistic development, but need to continue on that path with a young human that does not value your opinion most of the time, whose friends are way more important than anything else and whose hormones are making them unrecognizable in some of the things they do.
This is the last stretch we need to go through to try and get them ready for the real world and leading a fulfilled life.
This is where we need them to understand that failure is ok, get up and try again. If someone criticizes you, don’t take it personally. Be confident to try new things.
From the research I’ve done and what I’ve tried, I find that focusing on the following works well to develop the right mindset in day-to-day interactions without too much formal planning:
Share facts about the brain – make your teen understand how their brain works. How pathways are created, the difference between your fight, flight and freeze reactions and why the brain does that. There are so many interesting facts about the brain and so much we don’t know, it creates a sense of awe when speaking about it.
You will fail – everyone fails, even in the things you are good at. Show them examples of successes and successful people that failed. Make them understand that failure is the best learning tool. How you get up and try again, and again, is often closely related to the level of your success.
Can you improve a skill – if failure happened because you lack a certain skill, develop that skill. Everything can be learned and conquered by understanding how to do it and then practice, practice, practice.
Listen more than you talk – the more you listen, the more you learn, not only facts but how other people think and act. This will improve your knowledge as well as your ability to understand people and analyze situations.
If something doesn’t work and you can’t come up with a solution, there is no harm in asking for help – two heads are better than one, and a different perspective on a situation can drastically change your approach and solution to a problem.
When something works, use it – don’t spend time reinventing something that already works. Use it, make it your own, improve it if you can, but spend your energy on areas that you can make work for yourself.
The right mindset has an impact on how you see yourself, others, the world around you and your own abilities. By having a growth mindset, your teen will be ready to take on the world and know that nothing is impossible.
And there you have it, a holistically developed young adult, ready to take on the world!
