Visionary Child: How To Raise a Focused, Visionary Kid That Can Change The World by Jessica Fleming

Author:Jessica Fleming [Fleming, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talent Writers
Published: 2014-01-08T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6: Step Five – Aspire to Excellence

Encouraging your child to strive for excellence isn’t really a whole separate task for a parent that needs to entail a separate group of strategies. In reality, it’s merely an extension of the focus principle – stated another way, it involves pushing your child to concentrate her energies and attention on those areas of study that are of genuine interest to her. Ideally that would be all studies in every grade, and if that’s how your child develops, you probably won’t have too many problems with raising your kid in a distracted world.

If you don’t have a straight-A student on your hands, all is not lost. Assuming you are practicing some of the principles we’ve discussed already about communicating, emphasizing individual and family, and focusing, aspiring to excellence goes only one step further. Maybe there are only a few classes in school that really appeal to your kid, or maybe there’s only one. Maybe none of them do, but she is a real sports enthusiast and loves the exhilaration of training her body and competing against others.

Whatever your child’s particular interests, do your best to support her and encourage her to accomplish the maximum possible, and to strive for excellence. Not only will this have the effect of focusing your child on something worthwhile, it will instill a character trait that becomes a life-long barometer of self. Emphasize that the evaluation by others doesn’t matter so much as self-evaluation, and that kind of evaluation should be totally honest. This is the kind of solid foundation that could provide a basis for a future interest or career.

When a person employs this kind of honest evaluation of self, it leads to self-reliance and individualism, rather than the group mentality that often pervades social networking landscapes and mindless ‘tagging along’. This is the kind of person who becomes a leader and not a follower - an innovator, and a person who is passionate about what she is doing.

This doesn’t mean that your child should avoid her friends because it will always result in mindless activity – on the contrary, spending time with peers is a normal and necessary part of growing up. But that should not be the routine every day after school, for hours at a time. That is not productive use of time, and it’s not what is needed for individual growth. Time spent with friends should be monitored and limited, and the friends themselves should be known to parents, so that the experience does have growth value for the child.

Self-honesty also allows a person to admit when she has made a mistake, and do what is needed to correct the mistake and avoid the same thing next time. Everyone makes mistakes; honest and focused people learn from them instead of glossing over them or hiding them. If you are encouraging your child to aspire to excellence and the qualities attendant upon it, you must expect mistakes as a regular consequence.

When they come, don’t

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