Motivate Your Child by Making Them Imagine the Future
Your child doesn’t want to do this. Clean up his room. Complete her book report. Practice the violin. Whatever the impossibly difficult task at the moment. As a parent, you may be tempted to resort to nagging, but that will only upset everyone. According to a study by the University of Queensland, the best way to motivate children is to give them an idea of how they will feel in the future.
As an adult, you probably do this naturally. “It will be so good when I cross the finish line at 10 km this weekend / give a presentation without any notes / open the doors for guests and they can see the floor that has no wrinkled socks.” Episodic foresight, which refers to the ability to foresee the future, is a skill we can all work on. (Designer Debbie Millman gives her students a fantastic exercise in which they describe in great detail what their life will look like 10 years from now. Then they have to read it every year and watch what happens. “It’s magic, ” she said. .)
It turns out that children can develop episodic foresight at an early age. Greater Good Magazine pointed to a study by Australian psychologists examining whether the anticipation of “future feelings” could encourage young children to exercise longer before an upcoming event. The researchers presented three skill-based games to 150 children, ages 6 to 9, and told them they would be tested in one. Half were asked to imagine how they would feel if they succeeded in a future test, while the other half were simply asked to imagine how they succeeded, without any mention of emotion. Results: Children who thought about how they would feel in the future trained 60% longer than those who did not. Eight and nine-year-olds were the most motivated by the researchers.
How do you help your children imagine how they will feel in the future? Talk to them about how they felt in the past when they were successful in something. To encourage her child to practice on her instrument this summer, Lifehacker Health Editor Beth Skorecki plans to show him a few videos before and after he has progressed over the past year, highlighting how good it is to see the improvements. You can create a visualization board with your child and discuss how the people in the images feel when they score the winning goal or sing on stage, and then invite them to imagine themselves in their place. You can also adjust your language through daily activities: for example, when motivating your child to collect toys, you can say, “Let’s think about what it would be like to have a clean room for your friends to play in. v.”
Later, when they finally get the hard part, remember to pause and enjoy the moment. “You did it,” you can tell them. “Do you see how good it is?”