Empower Your Child to Succeed

One universal truth: you are your child's first teacher. Much of your child's future success in life can be traced back to life lessons learned early on from you, the child's parent.

The good news is that you don't have to have an MBA or be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to teach your child to how to succeed. Here are a few ways to help your children reach their fullest potential.

Empower Your Child. Once a child is starting to walk and talk, he is capable of "helping" which may or may not actually be of help to you. Let your child help you with everyday tasks, and you'll give him a sense of his ability to contribute and his place in the family. We all want to belong, even teenagers who balk, sputter and mutter about having to do things to help the family.

Incorporate learning with common tasks. The more he learns, the more inspired he'll feel to learn and succeed. For younger children, you can have them count the number of forks they put away while doing dishes. How many more knives are there than forks?

Engage a child's mind during rote tasks and you'll teach him to stretch beyond what is expected, which is necessary to succeed later in life. Successful people never do the minimum. The trick for you is to make it seem more like an enjoyable way to get a boring job done as opposed to "school."

As we age, creativity is often beaten out of us, rather than rewarded. A side benefit of finding ways to integrate learning into everyday activities is that you will enhance your own creative skills. It will have a cumulative effect. Success and creativity beget more success and creativity. With a little thought, you can turn mundane tasks into a source of fun, free-flow thinking, energy and reward for both you and your child.

Cultivate a Sense of Wonder. In the song, I Hope You Dance, Lee Ann Womack sings, "I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean." What a wonderful wish for your child. What a wonderful wish for anyone. It's a shame that people don't stop and look up at clouds to guess shapes or do leaf rubbings. It's hokey, and the kids may balk at it initially, afraid friends will see them, but if you initiate things, they may act like they aren't paying attention, but you'll catch them looking and thinking about things.

The late Rachel Carson, biologist and author of Silent Spring which exposed the dangers of DDT in the '70s, once said, "If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in." Here was a woman who worked in the sciences, generally a black and white field, yet she recognized that part of long-term success is in being able to maintain a sense of wonder about the world in general.

Encourage Goal Setting. I have had a bucket list for years that incorporates very ordinary things (learn to play chess) with much more lofty items. At the beginning of the year, I look over the list, rethink it, then mesh it into an annual goal list. That list eventually gets trickled down into the basic "to do" list. Talk to your child about setting goals and you will learn things about your child's dreams that you might have never found out otherwise. From the initial talks, you can help your child to solidify things he or she wants to accomplish. Everything the child does from those goals creates a sense of fulfillment and success.

Teach Your Child by Doing. My father has always had little side businesses to provide extra things for my family. Similarly, I've run several small businesses over the years. My son, a senior in college, has already applied for (and received) grants for entrepreneurial projects that will benefit the community. Let your child see your successes and failures. You'll show him it can be done, that educated risks are worth taking, if you fail at a task it isn't necessarily a failure, and so much more.

Encourage Free Thinking. Maya Angelou said, "You keep doing what you're doing, you keep getting what you got." No invention, no revolutionary idea, no real change comes from following the crowd or doing something the way it has always been done.

Your child may blurt out some wacky notions, but many a genius has been regarded as having some wacky ideas at some point in his life. Computer legends Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (who appropriately enough has created a Web site: www.woz.org called Just Think) are prime examples of how far free thinking can take you. Yesterday's wacky idea is the idea that we'll label as "thinking outside the box" tomorrow.

Teach Your Child Resiliency. This is a tricky one. The best way to grow a spirit of resiliency in a child is to make sure the child feels safe during trying times. During stressful times or traumatic incidents, you will visibly catch your child (any age) throwing glances your way. Again, you are your child's first teacher. Your child will take cues from you on how to feel. If you can maintain a sense of safety, that despite the fact that something awful has occurred, your family will survive, you child will not have as much fear. He will bounce back from things knowing that he will survive.