Empower Kids by Helping Them Identify with a Positive Role or Value

If the idea of projecting an as yet unverified positive attribute onto a child in your care (see last week’s post) strikes you as a bit disingenuous, consider the equally powerful cousin of this approach:  rather than project a belief about the capacity of a child, many parents, teachers and coaches find it very effective to project onto the young people in their care a sense of group identity, an identity which plays a powerful role in shaping behavior and therefore potentially leading a child to success.  So, for example, rather than wait till a player argues with an umpire or criticizes a teammate, a coach might remind his players at the beginning of each game that “Bulldogs don’t argue with umpires; it’s not how we play” or “Bulldogs play positive.”  Rather than reprimanding a player for breaking a rule, the coach in this example has invited his players to buy into an identity, to make it their own. 

Teachers who have studied Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory will recall that Vygotsky taught that cognitive development is largely influenced by the environment in which children grow up, and that language is the key to how children internalize ideas about the world and their role in it.  Through conscious, thoughtful use of language, effective teachers can shape the roles and values with which the children in their care identify.  Just as the coach in the example above used language to invite his players to identify with a team value, an effective teacher might remind her students that “Mrs. Robinson’s class is a role model for the younger children about how to behave at an assembly” or that “Mrs. Robinson’s students know their times tables.”

Parents can also consciously use  language to help their children to identify with roles and values embraced by the family, including those related to what it takes to be successful in school.  Thus, when my 10-year-old lamented that I wouldn’t let him turn on the TV even though he had “already read a lot today,” I simply shrugged and said, “Well, Tibbittses are readers.”