Raising children is one of the hardest jobs on earth that one of the parents can perform.
Raising a kid is like designing a new life. Mentoring your children is very important. However, Coaching your child is more important than mentoring them. Coaching your kids will help them shape their personalities and get to know their true potential at home and in life in general.
You can also know more about teen coaching and gaining parenting skills through our course Parenting Skills / Teens Coaching
Coaching Vs Mentoring
Coaching your children will increase their self-confidence and their self-esteem. As self-confidence is situational, we need to help them build their confidence by putting them in positions where they need to establish their identity and their characteristics in every situation. Their self-esteem would be very high.
And here are some tips that will help you how to coach your children.
How To COACH your Kid 101
1- Don’t Ask WHY!
Asking your child “Why have you done this?” wouldn’t really help you get the best answer from your child.
Instead, try asking them “What made you do this?”. Changing the tone of the question would make you get the best out of the child.
The reason why is that children don’t reason with common sense and reasoning yet like adults because they haven’t shaped and designed their meanings and frames yet. Most importantly, children take the “Why” question as an accusation or our way to blame them for something regardless of whether they have control over it or not.
Children are not yet aware of what they can and cannot control. It is very important to ask them the “what” question because it opens their eyes to the options In Front of them and their motives without them feeling blamed or attacked.
Adults can defend themselves against accusations by whatever defense mechanism they have learned or developed over the years, however, children are far from defending themselves. On the contrary, children would get defensive on spot and may break down because they feel threatened.
2- Ask Questions
We love telling our children what to do and what not to do. We assume that we need to tell them what to do and they need us to tell them what to do. We assume that this is the only way to raise children and protect them from anything that we don’t want them to experience.
Coaching doesn’t encourage it that way, as the Cons of these methods are far more than the pros of it. Along with adult supervision, we need to learn how to ask them questions and let them deal with the answers the way they think is right.
We need to understand and acknowledge the fact they need the coaching questions more than the mentoring techniques.
When we ask our children questions, they will be more connected with their identity, critical thinking, character, and emotions.
It will raise their awareness of their sense of self and their sense of the world. We will get to understand our children more by listening to them and understanding their thoughts and how they perceive the world.
3- Delegate Responsibilities
The last tip of coaching tip in this blog is delegating responsibilities. When delegating responsibilities to our children, we need to know first the urgency of doing so.
According to coaching techniques, delegation responsibilities will increase their skill and courage to take on things which will help in strengthening their character over time. As a result, their situational confidence will increase.
Resilience is one of the most important skills that will be gained from delegating responsibilities to our children because they will be prepared to deal with the consequences of their decisions.
On the other hand, they will experience high self-esteem when yielding the pros of their decisions. And before coaching our children we need to coach ourselves first. Watch this series of Self Leadership Coaching and learn new techniques about coaching.