Good Guidance
with Silke Hetherington, Simon Mayne
& Karyn Baxter
FROM THE GUIDANCE OFFICE
How To Encourage Our Kids To Practice Hard Things
Welcome back to Term 2! We hope you enjoyed the holidays with your kids and are embracing these weeks of only 4 days.
According to a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, 97 percent of employers say that reliability is a very or extremely important qualification for an entry-level job; it’s at the top of nearly everyone’s list. How do parents help their kids learn to be reliable—people whom others can trust to consistently do their best work?
One place to start is to teach kids the importance of practice. Kids practice to reach all kinds of goals—writing their names, dribbling a basketball, playing a song on the guitar. But they aren’t always motivated to practice, and they don’t always practice in the right way.
A highly effective and well-researched technique called deliberate practice allows you to repeatedly work on a mental or physical skill with the aim of getting better in the future. Research suggests that children as young as five can start to understand deliberate practice, and children and adolescents who engage in it make gains in school achievement and motor skills.