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The Secret Ingredient to Your Child's Success

You can send your child to the best schools, enrich their lives with activities, provide love, support and good values, and still fail to prepare them for success. What's missing? That secret ingredient called Optimism.

Martin Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology, reports some impressive findings for parents to remember:

• It's not the smartest children who do best in life, but the reasonably bright ones who are highly optimistic.
• Success in college is far better predicted by high scores on an optimism scale than by grades or SAT scores.
• Olympic gold medalists tend to score higher on optimism than the runners up.
• Optimists have better immune responses and cancer survival rates, and are more able to withstand adversity.

Can we teach children to be optimists? Yes, says Seligman in his book, The Optimistic Child, but we may need to work on our own responses first. The best way to raise optimistic children is to be optimistic yourself. Anyone — adult or child — can learn to put a positive, upbeat spin on life.

Optimists are merely people who explain adverse events to themselves in positive ways. They take a matter-of-fact, problem-solving approach and neither over-generalize that life will always be like this nor complain that bad things always happen to them. They don’t blame themselves unnecessarily.

For example, when the car breaks down, a pessimist might mutter: "Just my rotten luck! Why does this always happen to me! It will cost a fortune to fix and I'll have to wait here all day." More optimistic responses might be, "I’m glad I got the car safely off the road. It's a good thing it's daytime and this is a busy road. I'm glad that I have my cell phone with me."

The optimistic response also makes better parenting sense. Specific and positive, it provides a practical, immediate course of action and leaves everyone's self-esteem intact. To set a more optimistic example, practice Seligman's ABC's of learned optimism: Adversity, Belief and Consequences. Emphasize belief, i.e., what you think and feel about a negative event.

To teach a child the ABC format:

Use recent examples from the child’s life to transform pessimistic responses into optimistic ones. For instance, my son came home dejected after his first basketball practice. In the ABC's of pessimism, he told himself:

• Adversity: "I had a rotten time."
• Belief: "The other kids hogged the ball and just passed to their friends. They couldn't even see me. I'm too short!"
• Consequences: "I'll never be able to play!"

Take the same situation and put a positive spin on it.

• Adversity: "Yeah, I know what that's like. But it was just the first time, and a lot of those kids have played before and you haven't."
• Belief: "Short people can learn how to shoot from the outside. You've got to be fast and well-coordinated. And that's right up your alley. Weren't you fast at track and field camp?"
• Consequences: "Basketball is a great game, and when you catch on, you'll have a lot of fun. Besides, your older brother can teach you his moves."

After practicing turning negative thoughts into positive ones, you will find that the positive ones become more automatic. As a result, your child (and you too) will begin to realize that he or she can handle tough situations and you will see a rise in confidence and self-esteem.