Long term we’re doing basically three simple things. Well, they’re not as simple in practice as they sound. But what we’re doing, number one, is we’re teaching kids about their own strengths and weaknesses because the only way to be successful as an adult is to know and to have an honest appraisal of what you’re good at and what you’re not. It’s so that you can build a life around your strengths and so that you know you’re going to need to come up with compensatory strategies if the weak areas are going to be tapped. So we teach kids about themselves.
Number two, we want to monitor carefully what they’re able to do and to make sure that we are backing out of our involvement as soon as possible. So we’re going to fade from adult initiated to child initiated strategies and we’re going to fade from direct involvement to indirect involvement. So a really simple example of this is that often when kids are young we tell them over and over again what they need to do, go get your hat, go get your shoes, do your chores, clear the table, feed the dog.
And if we just take one step back and we create a checklist, for young kids we can create a picture checklist, for older kids obviously they can help us to create it, and then instead of saying go do this what we say is have you checked your list for today? I think there may be some things you haven’t done yet, come back to me when you’ve checked everything off the list.
It takes it out of our initiation and it helps them to learn tricks for supervising their own energy.
