7 Ways I Helped My Child Excel And How You Can Do IT Too!

When my 5 year old wrote a small letter to his teacher saying that he is sorry that ‘the class troubles her,’ I knew I did the right thing when I introduced him to reading at 9 months old.
He invented his first superhero ‘Shock’ at age 7 and wrote a book on it which was descriptive, funny and quite ingenious at his age. We were happy to be the publishing house of shock part 1,2and 3. We bought the rights with chocolates!

It was a matter of great pride for us, when he did his animation course at 5, stood 3^rd at scrabble state championship as the youngest and made his blog before I made mine. Today he is 12, is learning Java after HTML, C and C++(which he did fully on his own). He is an avid reader, a logical thinker and a good student who recently scored the highest marks in literature in the entire school.

Now while I love boasting and I am pretty good at it as you can tell, but my point of sharing all this here, is to explain what I completely believe in.

I feel that the right conditioning can make or break certain personality traits and it is not very difficult for parents to do so. We all do whatever the school or the teachers tell us to do, without even thinking if that is contributing anything for our child’s unique personality. We rarely go beyond homework, exams, study apps or think differently.
I am passionate about the power of parenting and creative thinking and that is the reason why I am sharing a few things that I did with my son and now doing with my daughter who is special needs (Down Syndrome).  Only if we are a little conscious of our parenting we can change the course of our children’s life and can help them grow into good citizens as well as life long seekers of knowledge and critical thinkers.

We made every room a book room

I am a firm believer in the fact that the child will eventually follow what you expose him to the most. So I made sure it was the books he was surrounded with. I had to change few things around the house like every possible sitting place (even in front of the TV) had easily accessible books. My friends used to call me crazy when I did the same in bathroom/Toilet. Going to potty was never boring thereafter 🙂 . And please don’t forget if you as parents don’t read, then don’t blame the poor child.

We gave him activities which needed thinking, analysing, decision making

It is an extremely important thing that we parents don’t really give much thought to. You give your child blocks and he is busy making castles and you are happy that he is engaged but in order to help build his curiosity he has to be taken into the path of thinking and analysing. For example give him the same blocks, some toy animals, few other old items like cars and ask him to stage a play where those items are the people and the part of the city. And while he is the narrator who will tell what happened to that city one night, you help sponsor the event. Now it’s for you to imagine how many skills you are helping him develop.

I will tell you an additional thing that I used to do with this, I used to call my neighbours and their children for the fun watch, with free popcorn and cold-drinks. I know it can be difficult hearing about aliens he has imagined and the flying unicorns which would help save the earth but be patient! You are helping him learn some great life skills.

We made good use of the camera

The time that we are in, cannot be more conducive to teaching anything if we really put our minds and hearts into it. We have all the technologies handy, we just need to open our eyes and learn to use it differently. Cameras can be the greatest teacher in inculcating creativity in kids. Let me share what we used to do. I used to give my son things like a pen, book or any random thing in the house and used to ask him to shoot an ad film to sell that product. Now he had the privilege of using the camera and shooting the movie which would later be shown to ‘the dad and the other family members (big deal for a 6-7 year old).

He had to write the poem or the words (writing), choose the setting (screenplay), finalise the characters (casting) (friends were happy doing a role) and then putting it all together (directing). One big project, constructive plays activity, multiple skills learnt and above all whole lot of confidence.

Develop spontaneity

It is not as difficult to learn if one of the parents is gifted with it otherwise also this is not something that cannot be developed later. For example: our favourite game used to be ‘Speak up Now’ which meant you would be given a random topic out of the blue whenever, wherever and you’ll have to speak on it for at least for 2 minutes without taking a pause. You can talk whatever as long as it is within the topic ( suggested topics are fan, chair, my trip to market, I wish I could change etc.) And the best part? Your child can ask you the same, so everybody had to be prepared all the time. It is pretty funny if you think about it. It gives a lot of spontaneity, enhanced vocabulary, coherence of thoughts, and command on the language. Try it! It really works.

D.E.A.R Time

I love reading and I knew how important it was for me as well as for my son to read and more than that, to be passionate about it. Based on Pavlov’s conditioning, we made 7’o clock our D.E.A.R (Drop everything and read) time. Where everybody would read for one hour. It can be anything! A newspaper, a story book, a magazine (I was anyway the in charge of what comes in the house) but everybody would read. It took me a little time but soon 7’O clock meant books. It still does!

Talk sense and give directions to their racing thoughts

I am not an expert in this but I know children need directions otherwise their thoughts would mostly be about super heroes and flying UFOs, not that I have a problem with them but I believe it is extremely important to give fodder to the thoughts of your children, talk sense and show them the amazing power of disagreement, discussions and arguments by showing it yourself.

Ask them if they could invent something what would it be? But you have to be ready with your questions and possible directions when they say something like a robot. Ask those further questions like what would the robot do? Where would it stay? What would it eat, probe them, help them develop the idea; tell them that ideas need to be thought through. And don’t be judgemental or patronising about their thoughts and ideas. Be open minded and supportive. This is my 9 year old talking about his idea of parents and parenting, because no topic is out of bounds.

Give them freedom

A lot of parents say they do but they don’t. They never treat their children as individuals; they treat them as per their moods and judgements. I can share my example; my son has been independently on the computer since he was 4. We told him we trust him. Even now, he has complete freedom of thoughts and studying as per how he likes.  And he has earned it over the years. Ten years ago, our old computer needed formatting almost every month because he used to crash it trying to download something or by exploring something else. We both had already decided that we would not stop him from exploring. The result? He could write a blog at 8, install an operating system and drivers by the time he was 8. Have confidence!

Make them rational thinkers

This trait would help them develop an objective outlook in life which would help them more than your pampering and spoon feeding your own prejudices. Don’t force your choices or opinions. Help them build their own by providing unbiased information and don’t try to swing it either way.

This is one of the greatest trait or outlook that you can help your child develop. If your child asks you which political party you support? Don’t give them a handy answer. Give them some information about both, ask them to search on the internet, make up their mind about it and then have a discussion about what he thinks and why he thinks that. Your objective and rational approach towards others would also help him develop his own and he/she  would connect with people more than mere liking or disliking them . When he won a ‘Fair player trophy’ and the most green cards at his football club, we knew we were raising a good boy.

P.S – This is a pretty long post but I hope you all gained something from my experiences and parenting exeriments. If yes, please leave a comment and for more such tips like us on Facebook,

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