As a parent, what aspect of your child’s development should you give more focus to – their character development or their intelligence and mental development?
It is a dilemma faced by most parents at least at some point in their life.
It’s very hard to believe it when we share that character traits can have more influence on a child’s academic and extracurricular performance, as compared to their level of intelligence.
How can this be?
Character helps them have discipline which in turn helps them focus and persevere towards their goals. It is found that children who exhibit high intelligence levels at an early age often tend to become underachievers once they grow up. It is because they end up with an inflated sense of their capabilities and often grow complacent while others work hard to make up for their lack of skills. A hardworking, humble, and disciplined child will have more achievements in the future than a childhood prodigy who grows complacent and loses their advantage.
Also, it is found that character development helps children to be better team players and thrive while working in cooperation with others. Most companies or workplaces value the ability to work well in a team over intelligence factors or individual competency. The modern workplace has undergone drastic changes. Well-behaved individuals with friendly personalities are favoured to be hired rather than intelligent people who might tend to have differences with their coworkers. Your personality and willingness to learn and cooperate are valued over your skill level today. From these, you can infer how much good character development can help out your child. So, as a parent, what can you do to help them in that aspect?
Lead by example
For every child, their parents are their role models. They watch and learn from your every action. Show integrity and hold values in your life that they will come to imitate. Talk to them about how you face different dilemmas and how you act in such situations. Your experiences and valuable experience will serve as insights that they will never forget.
Teach them to respect everyone
Your children might be confused about how to show respect to people in general. Show them how to act around others and the level of respect they have to show. The best and simple advice you can give your children is to act towards everyone the way they want others to act towards them. Respect others in the way you want them to respect you. It can do wonders to the relations in your life – both personal and professional.
Give them more responsibility
Give your children more chances to have responsibility and chances to make decisions on their own. Giving them more responsibilities can help them gain experience as well as feel good about themselves.
Teach them that actions have consequences
When they do anything bad, talk to them about it and help them realise the effects of their actions. If it requires punishment, you can do so by taking away their privileges like screen time or withholding their pocket money. Never resort to physical punishments. Every mistake is a learning opportunity. So, try to see these as teachable moments, rather than as failures.
Listen to them and encourage them to listen to others
Spend time with your children and listen to their thoughts and worries. Time spent with parents is important for the character and mental development of children. Listen to them without judgement and teach them to listen to others in the same way too.
Help them develop self-discipline
Discipline is more vital to success than any other skill or a personality trait. No matter how intelligent or capable a person is, without self-discipline, they won’t amount to much in life. Only a disciplined person can utilise his potential instead of getting distracted and procrastinating in life.
Teach them to be honest
Teach your children to be honest and upright in every aspect of their lives. Integrity is something that will help them gain the respect and trust of people around them and will make them more likeable.
Teach them compassion and humility
Teach your children to behave with compassion and humility to all; not just human beings, but also all living things. Of course, this is best taught through us practising this characteristic as well!
Teach them to be team players
Help them work and play with others and be team players. Help them see the importance of teamwork. Encourage them to participate in team sports. It is the best way to teach young children to work well with others and develop a sense of camaraderie.
Teach them to offer a helping hand
Advise your children to offer help to people around them in ways they can. Try to develop a helping mentality in your children from a young age. Of course, the best way to do that would be through your actions.
Intelligence can’t help build big things in life unless human cooperation is there. Human cooperation is what made all the progress and development around us possible. So, teach your children values and character traits that will help them be morally and socially adept members of society. We wish you all the best! 🙂
Exam Smart Tips
Exam Smart Tip #1 – How to Encourage Our Kids to Speak Better?
Exam Smart Tip #2 – How to avoid carelessness?
Exam Smart Tip #3 – Establishing Routines!
Exam Smart Tip #4 – Let’s Read Carefully!
Exam Smart Tip #5 – Beating the Exam Fever!
Exam Smart Tip #6 – How to Eat Right for the Exams?
Exam Smart Tip #7 – How to Avoid a Meltdown?
Exam Smart Tip #8 – Taking Stress out of Tests
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