Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

I‘ve learned over the course of the last few years to never suppress my enthusiasm for anything my kids accomplish, and to try my best to treat each kid differently based on each ones personality and strengths.  There was a time though that I found myself, on occasion, being subdued in my accolades for fear of making one of the kids feel “less”.  It was in an attempt to show that I don’t have favorites.  Of course the big lesson here is that feeling proud of your kid does not mean you are not proud of the other.  To give praise to one does not mean that I take praise from the other.  But, I was somewhat worried that if I praised the success of my more athletic son then it would make my brainier son feel inadequate.  Or when I gave one of them a high-five for doing well on math homework that the other would feel discouraged because it takes him longer to understand his lessons.  An important thing for any parent to learn is that there is no such thing as too much honest praise.  And, there will be no hard feelings between siblings as long as each is aware that they posses different strengths that are equally admirable.  There is also the matter of competition with outsiders.  Is the best course to keep them in a protective bubble so they never get discouraged?  Or is it better to let them fail and potentially find out that they aren’t very good at something?  Kids learn by competing with each other and sometimes winning and sometimes losing.  It can get discouraging to lose, but there is no better learning opportunity.    

Like I mentioned before, one of my sons is one of those sorts of athletes that comes along rarely.  He’s just gifted; there’s not really another way to put it.  My younger son though is a normal little kid when it comes to sports.  He enjoys himself, but he’s not really that great at the whole sports thing.  As an athletic activity they both participate in gymnastics — at the same time (although they are in different classes), and I sit with the rest of the parents to watch.  After the class I meet them both at the door, and I want to gush over how well they did.  But, obviously I can’t give them the same praise because that would be dishonest.  My old way to solve this problem was to simply not say much of anything.  I would give them an equal, “good, job” and a pat on the head.  But, I realized how wrong that was.  My older son deserves the gushing praise that I was holding back, just as much as my younger boy deserves all the praise I want to give him when he does his math homework so well.  My new way of dealing with it is to heap all the praise I can muster onto the boy while asking the little one if he enjoyed the class and was happy.  I then take them both out to ice-cream.  And, it’s a miracle, there is no conflict.  The result is that my older boy recognized how proud I am of him, and my younger son knows that I am proud that he participated at tried his best.  They both get ice-cream.  That’ll always keep kids happy.

Now, from my kids’ perspectives I have realized that they are natural competitors.  They always want to win, and when they don’t, they get frustrated.  There is a movement these days among educators and coaches to give everyone grades and scores based on effort rather than actual accomplishment.  In sports, I’ve seen teams recently who don’t even keep score.  They just run around and then it’s over.  Weird.  In schools, I have heard from teachers who don’t give out F’s because it makes the kids feel bad.  There is even a school that I know of in New Hampshire that doesn’t give grades at all.  This all fits into what I was saying before about my kids’ gymnastics classes.  My two kids don’t mind that one of them is better than the other.  They have learned to accept that there are some things one of them will naturally excel at while the other might struggle a bit more.  They play the game, win or lose, and they don’t give up, and they both walk away from the experience with no hard feelings.  That’s life.  My role as a parent is to simply encourage them to try their best and to push them to never give up.  My job, as I’ve learned, is not to soften the pain of failure by removing the obstacles or to treat both kids as if they were the same person so that the other doesn’t feel bad.  It is to make them feel secure with who they are by being honest with my praise.  I am equally proud that my little one does not give up at sports as I am that my older boy is so good at them.  But, that does not mean that the praise I give will be the exact same praise.  It will be tailored so each kid knows I recognize their strengths and support their efforts.

The big thing to learn from sports, education, and life in general is that we can’t be great at everything.  My younger son is a thinker.  He’s a wonderful reader and he formulates ideas in his head with great clarity.  My older boy is a gifted athlete who runs circles around his competition.  I used to try to make them feel good by withholding a certain amount of enthusiasm when one of them accomplished something great so that the other wouldn’t feel like he didn’t do as well.  But, life doesn’t work that way.  We win at some things and we lose at some things.  When parents, coaches, or teachers try to mitigate a child’s disappointment by making things easier or giving a platitude that somehow everyone is the same, the kid won’t feel like there is any point in competing at all.  That is a sure fire recipe for mediocrity.  As for me, now I know that all I need to do is be equally supportive of them both while being conscience of their differences.  Being equally supportive is not the same thing as giving equal praise.  Kids know when their parents are being fake.  They know when a parent is giving platitudes rather than good honest praise.  As long as I am honest with them they will always try their best and, in the end, will turn out to be everything they can be in life.

No related posts.