3. Managing weaknesses is also a key to successful parenting.
Areas of weakness are innate, just like talent. There are just things that we are not good at and frankly don’t enjoy doing. Instead of wasting so much time and effort trying to marginally improve our child’s weaknesses, we should focus the lion share of the effort to growing talent and do what we have to do to ensure that weaknesses don’t get in the way of success.
For example, my futuristic son is often times so engrossed in his vision of the future that he forgets his lunch, snack, reading log, hat, shoes, etc. You name it … he has left it! For a few weeks this was a constant sense of struggle for us. I didn’t want to raise someone who couldn’t function in the real world, but I also didn’t want to spend hours a day reminding or scolding. We found that we could manage this “weakness” by setting everything out the night before and making a checklist that he could review each morning before walking out the door. Children grow and learn better when they are able to put their energy into what they can do rather than slaving away on what they struggle with.
We are all unique individuals but this principle seems to be amplified exponentially with each addition to the family. It is quickly apparent that what works with one child, will not work with the others.
My boys couldn’t be more different — one eats everything in sight while the other doesn’t like his peanut butter sandwich if the texture becomes “too crumbly,” one will sleep through hurricanes while the other wakes when the heater turns on, the list goes on and on. Strengths-based parenting helps us as parents to get curious about our kids, to discover what makes them uniquely them. Yes, it will take more effort than a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting, but the results are more than worth it!
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