Intentional Strength-Based Parenting
Stay Positive
Work from strengths – yours and your child’s.
This means you’ll continually discover, tap into, and grow your own and your children's abilities and talents to address day-to-day parenting challenges. By acknowledging and respecting your children's unique qualities, you create a foundation for them to develop a strong belief in themselves.
The result? They’ll be better able to realize their potential and dreams.
Each child is unique. Learning who your children really are, and helping them grow into their uniqueness is an awesome and ongoing responsibility. All through childhood, kids try on new ideas; experiment with new colors and tastes; pretend to be doctors, astronauts, nurses, and scientists. Through both work and play, they try to figure out who they are.
Witnessing the unfolding personality of a child is like planting an unlabelled flower seed. You water it, give it sun, and wait with curious anticipation as it sprouts, develops leaves, buds, and finally blooms. With children, each blossoms uniquely.
When parents -- with the best of intentions -- tell children who they should be instead of helping them discover who they are, they interrupt this process, and children lose a piece of their identity. When you support them in growing their strengths, you free them to thrive!
Intentionally building on children's strengths rather than focusing on correcting their weaknesses helps them grow into competent, emotionally healthy adults. Our impulse tends to focus on what needs correcting.
Amplifying children’s strengths is more effective in helping negative behavior fall to the wayside. By helping your children grow their talents and gifts, many of their difficult behaviors will fade away -- just as a garden, well tended, will ultimately overtake the weeds.
As a parent, you, too, have unique strengths that come naturally to you. You can use your own gifts and talents to develop skills that will help your children fulfill their potential.
