Recently while talking to a friend I realised about a pressing issue with children namely racing to be the first.
When our children are young, they want to understand the world around them and hence take a long time to do any task. We are almost always in a hurry and never stop to think how will it impact our child later.
For example we want a child to wear his shoes quickly, we race with him saying "who will be first?" The child thinks its cool to be first and hence wears his shoes quickly and our problem is solved and both of us are happy and cool.
Now this happens repeatedly and the message that being first is cool gets well ingrained in our child's head and sometimes becomes an obsession. Do we really want that? Was that what we intended when we raced the first time?
So what should we do? I think, we should ourselves slow down and let our child do his work at his own pace. When we need to go out, always keep a window of half an hour or more before leaving just to make sure your child gets to do all that he wants at his own speed. This helps in so many ways. The child learns to be independent, doesnt feel the pressure and is less stressed and happy. In the long term, we see our child not competing with anyone and not racing to nowhere! So you might ask, whats wrong with competition? Well I'll save that for a future post or you could watch the movie :)
