Competence is about the ability to handle situations effectively. It's not
something that is this vague can-do spirit. It's actually rooted in reality
and experience. It's about having the skills and we can build those skills in
our children. First, it's about noticing and building on the skills that they
already have but it's also understanding that they haven't yet had the life
experiences or the opportunities to develop other skills and that we can
prepare them for life when we help them to build those skills. So what do they
look like? Organizational skills. If you don't have organizational skills you're
not going to succeed academically now or in the workplace in the future.
Communication skills. If you don't have communication skills you're not gonna
find your spouse ultimately and you're not gonna be able to get a job. You have
to be able to say to someone I'm the right person for the job.
Self advocacy skills. Skills to be able to stand up and do what you know is
right even if the people around you are telling you otherwise, which brings me to
peer negotiation skills, right. We worry about peer pressure. We don't need to. Not
if we prepare our kids to know how to recognize and respond to peer pressure.
Just as important as our building our kid's skills is us not tearing down the
skills and competencies they already have. Too often adults treat young people
as if they're incapable. In a top-down fashion, we correct them, we over-protect
them, and we tell them what to do a classic example is the way we lecture
kids. We understand the consequences that might happen from a given action and
what do we do? We tell them in rapid-fire and we tell them all the things that can
go wrong and then end with some dire consequence. They can't hear us it's not
the way their brains think. So they get that we don't think they're capable.
They get that we're angry and frightened, but they don't know why. When we learn to
talk to kids differently and honor the intelligence that they do have by
breaking subjects down so that they can figure things out one step at a time,
another step, another step, so that they get it, got it, own it, then we honor the
intelligence that they have and they feel capable and they feel competent.
When you're thinking about competence in your kids, so often we forget how to
prepare our kids. Preparation is protection. Hovering and overprotection
is not a way to build your child's competency. Think about what message
overprotection sends. When you step in too often and you say things like let me
help with that, what's the message? the message is I don't think you're capable
of doing this on your own. It's not a good way to build our kids competencies.
So think about this: do you let your child make her own mistakes or develop
the skills to right herself? Do you try to protect her from every fall or help
her understand that falling down is the only way you learn how to get up
stronger? Truly, fear of failure is the greatest way to stem competence building.
What you want is for your child to understand where they excel. You want
them to find their islands of competencies and I call these spikes.
Ultimately when we're successful it's going to be because we figured out how
to contribute to the world. What is our spike? What are we great at? The only way
we're gonna figure that out is to know what you're not great at, and that's
gonna be a lot of trial and error to get there. So literally, we have to learn to
celebrate our children's unevenness so that their spikes show, alright. You
have to ask yourself: are you scared of failure?
Do you model for your child that when you fall down you get up stronger? Does
your child know that you're uneven? Every one of your kids is different. Every one
of them is developing a different skill set. Every one of them has the
opportunity to sharpen their unique spike and what happens so often, when
we're incredibly well-meaning, is to compare one child to the other. And when
we do that, we undermine kids ability to feel good about themselves. Another way
of understanding the importance of unevenness and actually why we should
celebrate unevenness and why it leads ultimately to success for our
adolescents is to actually look within their brains and understand what's
happening. There's a process called "pruning" that's happening. So what happens
is, during adolescence, it's not that you grow extra brain cells. What happens
during adolescence is that your brain cells become more efficient. They become
more efficient in two ways. One is the body lays down what's called myelin. It's
called myelination and what this is is insulation in the brain that makes all
the signals travel more efficiently and faster. The other thing that's happening
is brain cells are connecting with each other and forming these very important
connections and the brain cells that don't need to be a part of that
connection get cut away. That's called pruning. Adolescent
development is about pruning. It is about taking away that which you don't need
precisely so that which is your strongest self rises. So when your child
during adolescence is beginning to cut away certain activities so they can
concentrate on something else. So when your child is beginning to realize that
they're not as good at one subject and want to devote more time to another
subject, don't think of that as quitting. Don't think of that as failure. Think of
that as pruning, pruning to develop the strongest shoots and it mimics or
copies exactly what is happening in the adolescent brain. You know, it's
competencies that build confidence and that ultimately develop in us the
skillsets that are gonna allow us to flourish in great times and to withstand
the challenging times