Habits you will need in the 21st century
Imagine your child at the top of a ski slope…. are these possible thoughts that scroll through your mind?
- What if she falls?
- Is it safe for him?
- Am I being a pushy mom?
- Am I being a responsible father?
Would you as a parent let your child go ahead and ski and risk falling? How you answer this question has a large role to play in how happy, successful and purposeful your child’s life will be. As parents we tend to subconsciously burden our children with our fears, expectations and limitations and to be honest it’s the most natural thing to do because we do not know any other way. However, what if I told you that you could learn to move beyond your limitations and also help your child move beyond their limitations. Just by inculcating 16 habits.
Experts have identified 16 habits that can help an individual thrive in life. These habits are commonly known as the Habits or the Mind or thinking habits. These habits play an important role in our lives as they help us combat the negativities that surround us. It has been documented that an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% are negative, and 95% are repetitive. These negative thoughts tend to weigh us down and they limit us.
In life, we will face ups and downs and children need to be equipped to deal with both. The ups can make them arrogant while the downs can bog them down and want to give up. However, when we work on inculcating the habits of the mind in children, they learn to look at the positive side of things, tend to surpass the negative thoughts with ease and learn never to give up.
The 16 habits of the mind are:
Each of these habits plays an important role in our lives and when we start working on inculcating them at a young age. We provide children with the right tools to help them build a strong foundation, which in turn helps children build happy and secure lives, where no setback can bog them down or no negative opinions affect them. These habits help a person feel secure and look beyond the situation at hand. They help them look at alternatives and answers to get out of a situation they feel stuck in. This makes sure that children become more than resilient, they become anti-fragile. This means they will thrive no matter what.
Since I am a strong believer in the Habits of the mind and its benefits, I made sure that the curriculum we developed for our schools included the fundamentals of these habits and I continue this tradition as I am building the curriculum for my online school — Korroboree.
Each one of us needs to understand the habits of the mind and how to get children to practice them. We need to keep in mind that children learn from observation and not by being told to do something. So, if you want children to practice these habits you need to follow them yourself. For example, if you want your child to have less screen time, then you need to limit your own screen time and make sure you explain to your child why you are in front of the screen for a long while. Building these habits of mind takes continuous and consistent effort till it becomes second nature.
Each one of these habits is important and each one of them has a unique role to play. I will be touching upon each one of them and how to practice them with children in the following blog.
