Summer Reading

Some ‘old’ books are still good information. Here are a few ideas I have always appreciated because while times have changed, children are developmentally the same everywhere.

“Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman emphasizes that the happiest and most successful people are those who have the capacity to:

Ability to empathize

Capacity to delay gratification

Competence to contain or manage emotions

In one of my favorite authors of child-rearing, Dr. T Brazelton, observed that the difference between two outlooks (children who are confident and optimistic versus those who expect to fail) start to take shape in the first years of life. Dr Brazelton, says that ”parents need to help generate the confidence, the curiosity, the pleasure in learning and the UNDERSTANDING OF LIMITS (my caps) to help children succeed in life.

“Letters for Our Children”, edited by Erica Goode, gathered letters that adults wrote to children. These authors were parents, grandparents, step parents, friends and relatives. One in particular caught my attention........

“Dear Randy,

Soon you will leave home and go off to college. The successes that will come your way will be great fun. But the failures will be your most valuable lessons. How a person decides to handle failure has a great deal to do with everything else in his life. Some people deny that the failure was their fault. Refusing to accept consequences seems to be a national pastime.

You see Randy, successful people are successes because they know how to handle their failures. You must learn to handle failure too.

DON’T FLUNK FAILURE!

Your stepdad, Skipper”

Let’s help our children learn the same; face our fears, face our consequences and thrive .

Swimcerely, Irene