- Your child wants you to watch them! They crave your attention.
- The average American spends over 5 hours a day on their phone!
- Positive Attention is better than Negative
- Kids will do what they have to, to get your attention – even if it’s bad
- Class is only 40 minutes
- Talking to your child about class and being involved builds great relationships
The best thing you can do for your child is watch them in class. If you are watching you will:
- Know how to help them
- Show you care
- Be able to make small corrections to behavior
- Have something to talk with them about
- Be able to reinforce good behavior
- Praise your child
We totally get that you have work and other things, but let’s make an effort the next two weeks to:
- Minimize phone usage during class – maybe wait til later to text or answer that call if you can, but don’t use your child’s time to surf the web
- Use your phone to take a picture of your child and share it with family and friends – this shows how proud you are and reinforces their desire to make you proud
- After class talk to your child about what you liked about class and ask them what they liked? Set the tone. If they had a bad day, and you ask them if they liked class – they might not have a positive answer. Maybe start with “Wow, I can tell you’re getting strong (faster, better listener, better form)”. Then ask what they liked? Don’t ask yes or no answer questions (did you have a good class?). Ask “What was your favorite thing?” “What do you want to work on?” (Your child would probably love the chance to have you help him practice, maybe even ask him to teach you some of his kata!)
- Let them know what you think of their behavior and what your expectations are. Try to be positive, but also don’t pander to your child. They’re not stupid. They’ll see right through it. “I like how quickly you ran and got lined up, next class lets see if you can work on not talking in class”. If they’ve had a particularly bad day. Let them know it’s ok to have a bad day, but that you expect better of them and that you know they can do it. Set small goals and then build them up when they do it!
- Let them know you are proud of their hard work. That what they are doing is cool! Not everyone can do karate. Then reinforce a desire to do their best. To often parents think this is a built in skill, but most kids think they will just be naturally good and when they don’t do well, they quit. We don’t want to make that quit muscle any stronger than it naturally is.