I am sick of Aaron's bad attitude.
Anything he can't get right the very first time seems to put him in tears and "I HATE *fill in the blank*"
Example. Today he had a friend over and I found some paper airplane instructions and printed them out. They were a little harder to follow than I thought. Aaron is nearly reduced to tears and of course announces how much he hates this stupid paper airplane.
His friend, nary a tear in site, said, "I don't hate it, it's just hard." Then pleasantly kept trying.
Any suggestions on how to get Aaron to adopt a similar attitude?
4 comments:
You have my sympathy. IM can pitch a frustration fit with the best of them. To be honest, time has helped more than anything. Her teacher said in the last report card that IM hasn't thrown a crying "I hate math" fit in months!
(But if you get any tips, send them my way. We could use all the extra help we can get.)
I might bring up a list of things they'd really dislike a lot more than X, or a list of things that are comparatively better, and get them to think a bit more about the language they use. "Do you really HATE making the paper airplane? On a scale of 1 spinach for dinner to 10 picking splinters out of your big toe, where would you place the paper airplane?"
Also, when you see him being more positive in the future, praise him then. (Comparisons to other people are, as Shakespeare said, odious, so, alas, you can't really call out his friend's excellent behaviour too much but comparisons to one's own behaviour are hard to shake.) Say things like, "Wow, I noticed you didn't complain at all about X, even though it was really hard. That really impressed me."
Also, you can do what John and I do with each other--we practise. I had a meltdown once in SF over parking, so the next time we knew we were going to be in a similar situation, we said to ourselves, "Look, this is going to be like this time. What will we do to avoid this meltdown?" We identified behaviour and language that triggered arguments and conscientiously tried to avoid it. Then after a few tries, we praised each other for our efforts. Less meltdowns occured all around.
Have you read the book "Mindset" by Carol S. Dweck? It discusses two fundamentally different approaches to difficult tasks.
In one approach, people believe that failure reflects negatively upon them; thus, if they fail at a difficult task they may react much like Aaron did (or like Avery does), reducing their efforts so that everyone can see that they've only failed because they didn't try very hard, or disparaging the task itself.
Aaron's friend perfectly represents the other approach, wherein regular failure is an expected part of growth.
Anyway, it's been a year and a half since I read it, but I remember it offering some advice on parenting strategies. I'll loan it to you, if you like.
Grant
My daughter is the same way, times 10. It's so frustrating. There's no reasoning with her, either. We've tried all kinds of things.
I read once that Edison made something like 1000 lightbulbs that didn't work before he made one that did. His attitude was, "I figured out 1000 ways that lightbulbs don't work." What an amazing attitude.
I have no idea how to get someone else to see it that way, though. :) Good luck!
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