Helping your child recognise their strengths and abilities
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Getting to know your child
You may think you already know your child inside and out. It’s true many of us do have very close relationships with our children and are doing everything possible to keep communication channels open and easily accessible.
We always eat together and often the best and most worrying discussions come up over dinner! So we know this works. But have you ever collected your child from school and all they tell you is that they are ‘fine’ and they can’t remember anything about their day?
There is usually a lot more going on than we all manage to glean out of them. Most of it is positive and nothing to concern ourselves with. However what if you could talk to your child in a way where they really opened up?
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Mindscreen
At the start of the month, I wrote about how we are following the Full Mindscreen experience. This is a course of lessons you work through together. Mindscreen offers powerful and practical resources for parents and teachers encouraging higher self-confidence and raised aspirations in children aged 11 upwards.
My son and I recently took a Free Child Self-Esteem Check as part of the programme which has given us a great starting point. We now know where our struggles lie.
Following this, we began the Mindscreen experience®. There are nine lessons in the course and I will be going through the process as we complete it so you can find out how well it would suit your family.
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Lesson 1: easyAwareness
The opening lesson helps children learn about their own personal characteristics and begin building their self-awareness. They use an easy-to-understand behavioural model which explores their own behaviour and helps them understand it.
They learn about their own natural behaviours and how others might see them. I’m pleased to see that there is an emphasis on everyone being an individual. All different and unique, that their behaviour isn’t good or bad, right or wrong. There’s no shaming.
Lesson 2: easyBelief
This lesson is fascinating even for us as adults. It focuses on how we create beliefs. If they are true or not? How they drive your behaviour and how they can help or limit you. Through a series of exercises, we examined our own beliefs, if we find them constructive or not and how they came to form.
Following this, we worked through a story. A situation is described to you which leads you to a certain belief even though we knew whilst reading it the belief we were developing wasn’t true. It was a great example of how easily we start to create a pattern in our minds, latch on to it and let it hinder us as we go through life.
The chapter gives your child the opportunity to explore how their own beliefs are formed and helps them to understand that beliefs drive their behaviour.
Most importantly it then gives them a simple technique to use when faced with negative beliefs and encourage positive ones.
Lesson 3: easyConfidence
As the programme continues you start to realise you are building foundations for your child as you go through it. After assessing your child’s feelings and needs together at the beginning and looking at how these behaviours may have formed from the beliefs. We next looked at how you can rebuild your child’s levels of confidence.
This lesson helps them explore their own strengths and builds self-confidence. They learn how confidence appears in body language. How a deflated posture can give a certain impression to others and make you feel low in yourself.
To combat this you are taught how to display a confident image and discover a trick to use when your child feels down or low in confidence.
It’s a real positive that personal strengths and weaknesses are covered in the lesson. This is rarely taught in schools and yet it’s vital we are aware that people are unique and each have something to offer.
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Lesson 4: easySkills
In easySkills your child explores and starts to understand more fully which skills they already have. They use brainstorming activities to discover which unique skills come to them naturally. The aim is for them to build a list of skills they know they possess and can rely on.
Even if your child is not able to identify the skills themselves you work through exercises together which take into consideration which activities they do now. Through this, you identify why they enjoy them. What each of these tasks involves and which skills your child has, in order to be already getting the most out of these activities.
The process is very interactive and full of positivity. It shows the parent how to connect the activities your child already does with the skills that they have so you can communicate them. Your child might not have made this connection themselves.
There is an activity log where you can add your activities and then see the skills associated with them as evidence of the skill. This all culminates in building the idea in your child's mind that they have a range of great skills which they can feel confident and proud about as they go forward.
How does it work for us?
We are only halfway through the programme so far. Already I can honestly say that every child should have access to this programme.
It does take time to go through but each lesson is so necessary. Not just because they follow a natural sequence but because you will miss so much value by not going through them properly.
My son really enjoys the time we spend on the lessons. It’s a great excuse for some 121 time with a parent or both! We are having much more in-depth conversations. There is also a real pleasure for my son in that he loves that we are trying to understand him so deeply.
If you are intrigued about the Mindscreen experience® start with the Free Child Self-Esteem Check and go from there.
In November we will be back with our final review of the rest of the programme.
