Fostering competence
I've been reading about parenting a kid who has social anxiety, and one of the recommendations is to support your child's feelings of competence, by giving them a chance to get very good at something.
Duchess loves feeling competent, like any 8-year-old kid. Like any human being. Like many human beings, she's not a huge fan of the work required to gain competence. If she's not good at something, she tends to give it up immediately. When she was 5ish, Cook and I identified that we wanted support her to keep working on something, to find out what it feels like to get over plateaus and barriers and get good at something.* We specifically identified swimming as something to push, and we did push it. (By which I mean that we keep signing her up for lessons and swim team, even when her enthusiasm is lukewarm. If she ever said she wanted to stop, we'd certainly hear out her arguments.) Her experience with swimming has certainly given her a chance to persist and improve, and that's been great. What's really been effective on that score, though, is kung fu,** which is a thing she chose herself. She loves kung fu. She loves the community, she loves the physical activity, she loves the required focus (she says "I don't think about anything when I do it - I just do things!"), she loves the orderly progress. (Not to mention the benefits of endorphins - she walks home after class red-faced, sweaty, and brimming with happiness and enthusiasm.)
All of which isn't to say that she is a kung fu master, or that she has become much more persistent or even much less likely to give up in the face of failure. None of that is true. It's just that it's all good, all of it. I have entirely moved past the things I dislike about the kung fu place. When she walks in there, it's pretty clear that she feels that it is Her Place. The teachers and students treat her with affection and respect, she has a great time with her friends, she is recognized for her commitment and focus, and so on. There are role models*** and mentors all over the damn place. I think most of us want a Place of our own like that, and I'm very glad that Duchess has one.If my kid wants to get endorphins, confidence, community, mentoring, and experience in persistence from this place, I'm there.
So that's the one kid. I'm a little stymied, though, about the other kid. Skipper also loves feeling competent, being a human being, but she doesn't like trying new things, which is likely to promote competence only in a narrow range of activities she has already begun doing.**** Her revenge-driven approach to extracurriculars motivated her to do a 5-class session of gymnastics at a community center. She resisted going to the class every time, and resisted participating in the class every time, but in the end she DID participate, and she seemed to be really enjoying it in the moment. However, she did not want to sign up for another session. She doesn't want to do anything. Given that a six-hour school day seems like plenty of activity for a sensitive four-year-old, I'm sure not going to push her to do anything she doesn't want to do. As I look ahead, though, I see the value of her finding something she likes to do, and sticking with it long enough to get good at it. I hope she'll find something, or somethings to make her own, and I look forward to supporting her in that.
Skipper practiced some of her gymnastics moves with Duchess (who is independently working toward a goal of doing a decent handstand), and got pretty good at doing bridges. At the beginning of her third class, she refused to participate for an extra-long time, until the class starting doing bridges, and she realized that none of them were as good at it as she had become. She ran straight over to the group and joined in. Competence is addictive.
*Without, you know, becoming a scary tennis parent. I have some natural Tiger Mother tendencies. This week I actually said to Duchess, over her misspelling of one word on her spelling pre-test (for which they prepare by doing language worksheets that include the words), "If you've seen the word before, you should know how to spell it." Being Duchess, she said "That doesn't make any sense," and scoffed right out of the room, leaving me alone to mull over my personality flaws.
** It's not actually kung fu. It's some kind of eccentric hybrid of kung fu and karate, practiced by a handful of people in a couple of studios. I have no idea what the rest of the martial arts world thinks of it, though I have watched some impressive fighting demos by black belts.
*** There's one kid, a 12-year-old girl who just got her black belt, who is clearly Duchess's role model in all things. She's confident, courteous, academically successful, and has several equally stellar close friends. She's also an accomplished swimmer and volunteers at the library in her spare time. This is not a bad role model.
*** Playing babies, playing legos, playing house, coloring (she's an accomplished colorer already, in fact!), and drawing people with rectangular bodies, pointy heads, and stick limbs.
Duchess loves feeling competent, like any 8-year-old kid. Like any human being. Like many human beings, she's not a huge fan of the work required to gain competence. If she's not good at something, she tends to give it up immediately. When she was 5ish, Cook and I identified that we wanted support her to keep working on something, to find out what it feels like to get over plateaus and barriers and get good at something.* We specifically identified swimming as something to push, and we did push it. (By which I mean that we keep signing her up for lessons and swim team, even when her enthusiasm is lukewarm. If she ever said she wanted to stop, we'd certainly hear out her arguments.) Her experience with swimming has certainly given her a chance to persist and improve, and that's been great. What's really been effective on that score, though, is kung fu,** which is a thing she chose herself. She loves kung fu. She loves the community, she loves the physical activity, she loves the required focus (she says "I don't think about anything when I do it - I just do things!"), she loves the orderly progress. (Not to mention the benefits of endorphins - she walks home after class red-faced, sweaty, and brimming with happiness and enthusiasm.)
All of which isn't to say that she is a kung fu master, or that she has become much more persistent or even much less likely to give up in the face of failure. None of that is true. It's just that it's all good, all of it. I have entirely moved past the things I dislike about the kung fu place. When she walks in there, it's pretty clear that she feels that it is Her Place. The teachers and students treat her with affection and respect, she has a great time with her friends, she is recognized for her commitment and focus, and so on. There are role models*** and mentors all over the damn place. I think most of us want a Place of our own like that, and I'm very glad that Duchess has one.If my kid wants to get endorphins, confidence, community, mentoring, and experience in persistence from this place, I'm there.
So that's the one kid. I'm a little stymied, though, about the other kid. Skipper also loves feeling competent, being a human being, but she doesn't like trying new things, which is likely to promote competence only in a narrow range of activities she has already begun doing.**** Her revenge-driven approach to extracurriculars motivated her to do a 5-class session of gymnastics at a community center. She resisted going to the class every time, and resisted participating in the class every time, but in the end she DID participate, and she seemed to be really enjoying it in the moment. However, she did not want to sign up for another session. She doesn't want to do anything. Given that a six-hour school day seems like plenty of activity for a sensitive four-year-old, I'm sure not going to push her to do anything she doesn't want to do. As I look ahead, though, I see the value of her finding something she likes to do, and sticking with it long enough to get good at it. I hope she'll find something, or somethings to make her own, and I look forward to supporting her in that.
Skipper practiced some of her gymnastics moves with Duchess (who is independently working toward a goal of doing a decent handstand), and got pretty good at doing bridges. At the beginning of her third class, she refused to participate for an extra-long time, until the class starting doing bridges, and she realized that none of them were as good at it as she had become. She ran straight over to the group and joined in. Competence is addictive.
*Without, you know, becoming a scary tennis parent. I have some natural Tiger Mother tendencies. This week I actually said to Duchess, over her misspelling of one word on her spelling pre-test (for which they prepare by doing language worksheets that include the words), "If you've seen the word before, you should know how to spell it." Being Duchess, she said "That doesn't make any sense," and scoffed right out of the room, leaving me alone to mull over my personality flaws.
** It's not actually kung fu. It's some kind of eccentric hybrid of kung fu and karate, practiced by a handful of people in a couple of studios. I have no idea what the rest of the martial arts world thinks of it, though I have watched some impressive fighting demos by black belts.
*** There's one kid, a 12-year-old girl who just got her black belt, who is clearly Duchess's role model in all things. She's confident, courteous, academically successful, and has several equally stellar close friends. She's also an accomplished swimmer and volunteers at the library in her spare time. This is not a bad role model.
*** Playing babies, playing legos, playing house, coloring (she's an accomplished colorer already, in fact!), and drawing people with rectangular bodies, pointy heads, and stick limbs.
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