Reading, exercising, self-discipline... How can I help my child develop good habits? This is the most effective way

90% of people's daily behavior is dominated by habit, Jobs once said:

"In the first 30 years of your life, you developed habits. In the last 30 years of your life, your habits have determined you. ”

In fact, many habits in life are formed in childhood, especially 3-10 years old, which is a critical period for character behavior and habit formation.

Parents know the importance of habits, but helping their children develop a good habit can be challenging.

In today's article, we share three tips that can effectively help children develop long-term good habits, hoping to inspire you.

01

Tip one: The environment is the soil of good habits

Sticking to good habits is not as simple as relying on willpower alone, and the impact of the environment has always been underestimated.

Sociologist David Halpen once mentioned such a story in his book:

If there are a lot of leaflets scattered on the ground, people are 8 times more likely to throw the leaflets on the ground than if the ground is clean.

In fact, many people don't like or approve of littering flyers, but when people around them do, they also choose to go with the flow.

"Clean ground" is a good environment, which provides a seemingly inconspicuous psychological resistance to the emergence of bad habits.

It is also instructive to put this example in homeschooling:

Children do not like to tidy up, the things on the table are often chaotic, we try to ensure that the family environment is clean and clean, so that children are "embarrassed" to destroy this environment;

When the child is addicted to mobile phones, we help him distract himself, take him to play with other things, so that he can't remember the mobile phone;

Children are gluttonous to snack, then the snacks at home should not be seen everywhere, put away, increase the difficulty of children eating snacks, and the behavior of eating snacks will be effectively reduced...

These bad habits, we can create resistance through the environment, making it difficult to breed bad habits.

An important concept was proposed in Habit Psychology: friction. The greater the friction, the greater the resistance.

To get rid of bad habits, we need to create an environment for children to increase the friction of habits. And good habits, we can also help through environmental manufacturing, so that habits become easier to implement.

We all know that students learn far less effectively in dormitories and at home than in study halls and libraries.

This is the impact of the environment on children's behavior, bad environment makes it more and more difficult for children with good habits to adhere to, and good environments can make children with bad habits reflect and change, and start to pay action.

There was a child who did not like to drink water before, and did not want to drink water until he was thirsty, and then the mother prepared several large-capacity water bottles and placed them in the corners where the children most often stayed at home, and the amount of water the child drank increased.

It's much easier to change situations than to change children.

In the same way, if we want our child to want to read more pages, then keep the book as wide as possible within reach... Make sure to pick up a book when your child wants to read it.

If you want your child to concentrate on learning, then try to give him a quiet area, do not have too much debris, and try to remove toys, snacks, electronic products and other things that are easy to distract your child.

All in all, what habits you want your child to develop, you can help him by changing the environment, clearing obstacles in the environment, and allowing the child's words and deeds to get the initial influence in the environment.

02

Tip two: Good habits require a simple and easy start

A Chinese teacher once told such a story:

He had just taken the third-grade homeroom teacher to that meeting, and he especially wanted to help the students develop the habit of keeping a diary, but it was difficult for many children to stick to it.

He thought of a way to tell the children: the diary is unlimited words, and one sentence is also possible.

When the children heard it, they were very happy, after all, this request was too simple, and it was almost effortless to stick to it easily.

Over time, some children find that a sentence is not enough to express their day, they begin to write longer and longer, and most importantly, they do not feel that this is a task assigned by the teacher, which is full of pain and resistance.

Surprisingly, even in the fourth grade, there are still many children who insist on keeping a diary.

The friend story reminds me of the experience of Stephen Gas, author of Micro Habits.

Stephen plans to exercise for 30 minutes a day, and like most people, initially burst into morale, but stick to it for two weeks and give up for various reasons.

To this end, he changed his thinking: reduce the intensity of the challenge.

Moving from "30 minutes a day" to "completing 1 push-up a day" may not sound like much, but the feeling of being able to succeed easily and maintain success kept Stephen going.

He seduces himself with this ultra-simple challenge, to complete one, to finish another, and slowly over-complete it until it becomes inertia.

He writes in the book: "The first step forward is always the most important.".

Therefore, at the beginning of cultivating children's habits, we should also make the first step simple and easy.

For children, the most effective way to motivate children to do something for a long time is the inner sense of accomplishment, and some ultra-small, ultra-simple steps can most stimulate children's sense of achievement.

Some children have difficulty developing good habits because they have a fear of difficulties from the beginning.

In order to make their children fall in love with reading, many parents buy a lot of books for their children at the beginning, even "tomes" famous works, children can not read at all, their reading interest has not yet sprouted, it has been extinguished by parents.

The correct approach is: at the beginning, we do not expect children to read a book in its entirety in a short period of time, but start from picture books, from simple to difficult, from shallow to deep, and the difficulty is progressive, and some classic masterpieces can start from reading 1 chapter and several pages a day.

Another example is doing housework, it is difficult for children to do well at the beginning, then start with the things that can be done at hand, such as returning things to their original places, after returning home, the coat is hung up in time, the shoes are put back in the shoe cabinet, and the books that have been read are immediately put back on the bookshelf...

Cultivating good habits requires a good start, breaking down the plan into small goals, as long as the child does it, parents can use encouragement to reinforce this behavior, and the child's sense of achievement will increase little by little.

Good habits are accumulated over time and slowly adhered to, and it is not appropriate to set the goal too big and too difficult at the beginning.

03

Tip three: Let children experience the benefits of good habits

If you ask everyone, what are the learning habits that you most want your children to develop?

Then take the initiative to write homework when you come home from school, you must be on the list.

There is a photo that has gone viral in the parent group:

Source: Hangzhou Daily

As the night darkened, under the street lamp, a little girl put her school bag on the ground as a writing desk, and was preoccupied with her homework.

It turned out that the little girl was waiting for her mother at the school gate, thinking that there was still some time, so she simply wrote her homework on the ground.

This makes many parents envious: "It's really someone else's child!" ”

When asked about her educational experience, the little girl's mother explained: "Since the child's primary school, we have stressed to the child that we can write homework carefully and have more fun. ”

Over time, children also find that after writing their homework early every day, they will have more time to do what they like. After the third grade, consciously writing homework became her most basic learning habit.

Let's look at what some acute parents do: as soon as the child is out of school, the parents follow and urge and roar, and the more the child rubs, the more the parents urge.

Gradually, the child subconsciously equates homework with pain after school, and when he feels that writing homework is painful, he will become more and more resistant.

In fact, what we want our children to do, do not always need to wave the stick, but to clarify the positive consequences of things with the children, with purposeful instructions to mobilize the enthusiasm of the children.

Let the child realize that good habits do not limit freedom, but create freedom.

For example, if you want your child to get up on time, you can say:

"Baby, if you get up now, you can eat your favorite little wonton on the street!"

For example, if you want your child to go out without rubbing, you can say:

"If we go out with our shoes now, we don't have to queue up to go to the amusement park, and we can play bumper cars for a while!"

This expression is much better than a direct threat or a rush, and it can make the child realize that there are so many benefits to completing things in the prescribed time.

In addition to this, there is also a "benefit" that parents appreciate the art.

For example, housework, children generally have a hard time experiencing any pleasant feelings from this kind of labor.

A parent once posted a photo of her son making breakfast for her in the third year of junior high school in the circle of friends, and his son usually did not have the habit of doing housework, so he made a sandwich for his mother on a whim this day, which moved his mother for a long time.

This circle of friends was seen by his son and became a kind of "disguised encouragement", he saw his mother so happy, experienced the value and significance of serving his family, and the number of times he made breakfast became more.

Psychological "rewards" are very useful to children.

Therefore, when the child's behavior is close to the good habits, we must give timely encouragement to strengthen the child's correct behavior, such as "this time without the mother's reminder to do a good job!" "The toys are really neatly packed", "This time it is much better than last time!" ”

The more positive feedback your child gets after doing something, the more it reinforces the behavior.

Having said so many methods, I finally remind everyone that developing good habits is not an overnight thing, there is no "crash course", we can only take advantage of the child's small, strong plasticity, pay close attention to and guide, urge children to persevere, the future can be nourished by good habits.

At the end of the article, I hope that our children can develop excellent habits and live up to every day.

END

This article is reproduced in Qian Zhiliang Studio (ID: qzlzgs), written by | Qian Zhiliang, a famous teacher at Beijing Normal University. Focus on special education, family education, early childhood education. He is the author of "Early Knowledge of Admission", "Early Education of Science", "140 Chinese Characters learned in a hurry", etc.