Three Powerful Phrases Kids and Learners Need To Hear Daily

Three Powerful Phrases Kids Need To Hear Daily | Blog | Family Matters via kwout

In the Family Matters blog Kevin East recommends that we regularly tell our children:

1. You are my son/daughter. This states ownership on my part, and identity on theirs…
2. I love you. This is one of those phrases I don’t think I can say enough…
3. I am proud of you. My pride in them is not because of performance, but because they are mine…

My wife passed on this wonderful link and I have been thinking about the importance of these three powerful phrases in building our children’s self worth and identity. I have also been thinking about the role that these positive reinforcements play in establishing an effective learning environment. In my post Quality time is spelled “TIME” I referred to the James Dobson statement “morality, values and beliefs are not taught rather they are caught.” By positively reinforcing your children you are not only affirming their value and self worth you are modelling positive encouragement and motivating your children to do the same. The learning that can happen in this type of environment is not dependent upon rewarding performance or other external factors. The motivation to be the best one can be, which is a never ending learning process, comes from intrinsic factors of confidence, security and assurance.

While intrinsically motivating our own children, or children within our extended family, is part of our responsibilities as parents I suggest it is also part of our responsibility as teachers. Unfortunately, political correctness and other societal norms and conventions prevent us from telling our students that we love them, but we can still let them know that we truly value and respect them. We can let them know that by being our students they will be respected, valued and appreciated. We can also let them know that we are proud of them and by doing so we will have created the foundation for a learning environment that is based on intrinsically motivating our learners to grow and be the best that they can be.

This isn’t just a well meaning platitude. Intrinsically motivating our students to learn is much more effective than that performance based “carrot and stick” methods. If we recall Daniel Pink’s research revealed in his book, Drive, and the video below the carrot and stick are only useful for simple straight forward tasks that require little or no thought. But for tasks that are more complicated and require conceptual and creative thinking (deeper learning) the carrots and sticks do not work. Pink argues that the science shows that people are purpose driven, care about mastery very deeply and want to be self directed.