Teach Children to Think Positively by Noting Little Things
“We are a family celebrating,” my son once said during one of our many holiday dinners on some unknown occasion.
“Of course,” I said when the three of us clinked glasses, as usual in a restaurant.
I’ve always loved to give my all for birthdays and holidays. Not only big, but also “significant holidays”. Because I never understood why you roll your eyes trying to destroy the monotony of life. At least where I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, February is filled with 28 cold, often dull days. If I can manage to turn one of those days into an explosion of LOVE, I see no reason not to.
This is what my dining room looks like every Valentine’s Day. A similar scene on St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. Don’t even make me start Halloween. And festive decorations take over the entire home, from ribbons hanging from the bedroom doorway to balloons down the hallway.
But we celebrate not only the holidays. We go for ice cream to celebrate soccer victories (or, more often, soccer defeats , because kids always try really hard and the effort deserves ice cream too). We go to a special breakfast when Ryan gets a new karate belt, or order pizza when my husband and I are reaching our career goals.
We are celebrating the first and last day of school. We celebrate good weather days with our burgers outside at the patio table and bad days with picnics on the living room floor. I’m actively looking for reasons to make the day a little more special than average.
I just do it to combat monotony, but former cognitive psychologist and writer Mary Widdix stated in the Washington Post that I could actually train my son’s brain to counterbalance his natural predisposition to negativity.
Studies have shown that people experience and remember negative emotions about five times more than positive ones. This means that for every negative experience, we need five positive ones to balance our feelings. There are also theories that suggest that negative emotions are governed by a different hemisphere of the brain than positive emotions, which can lead to over-analysis of negative experiences by people.
It is not unusual for some of our earliest or more detailed childhood memories to be associated with negative feelings. In my earliest childhood memory, a preschool teacher criticized my coloring a frog picture. She could still see some kind of white space in all the green chalk, so she sent me back to my seat to get better. I still remember how embarrassed I was when I returned to my table; I was so sure she would tell me that I did a good job.
“The trick to dealing with negativity is to help our kids form stronger associations with positive feelings while they’re young, ” Widdicks says to The Post . And we do this by simulating and celebrating small successes and happy moments.
They are attuned to learning about the world and actively patterning as they develop in adolescence and cutting off these neural connections. Wouldn’t it be great if we adults didn’t have to remind ourselves to seek out the little joys in life? If it was just second nature?
The practice of noticing and celebrating the moments when things go wrong is a gift we can give our children, and it can increase their overall happiness throughout their lives.
So, celebrate something. Celebrate good performance at your child’s favorite dinner. Celebrate the first big snowfall of the year with giant mugs of hot cocoa. Celebrate the fact that today is Tuesday by throwing a dance party in your living room. Later, your children’s brains will thank you.