One of the greatest gifts you can give your child is to train his or her mind to think positively. It does not mean assuming naive positivism or turning away from reality, but learning to find the positive side of the problems. In this way you will make his life easier and, consequently, he will also learn to develop this attitude, because educating a child also means re-educating ourselves.
Stop working on autopilot
Our brains are programmed to avoid anything that can harm us. This is one of the reasons why sadness is the emotion that lasts longer, 240 times longer than the rest of the emotions. Therefore, it is important to educate the brain to understand that things are not black and white and that problems can also hide the seeds of change.
The brain is recording the memories of how we react to different situations, thus creating "neural highways" that will turn into habits. This means that if children learn from an early age to focus only on the negative aspects, to take a defeatist attitude and to think of problems as obstacles, this way of thinking will soon become a habit.
Habits are not negative, on the contrary, they allow us to save time and energy that we can devote to other things. However, we must make sure that we reinforce positive habits and that they do not turn into obstacles to our development and well-being.
The "vase of happiness" technique
Elsa Punset has created a very simple technique to teach children to think positively in the shortest time possible. The interesting detail is that it can be done as a family, so everyone can learn.
The technique is called the "vase of happiness", but there are also some variations such as the "amphora of happy moments" or the "trunk of gratitude". You just need a transparent vase, where every night each family member has to put a note indicating something positive that happened to him during the day.
It can be anything from a smile that cheered you up to a comforting hug, something that amazed you… The important thing is that it is something that thrilled you at that moment or for which you felt grateful. You can use different colored sheets of paper. Ideally you should perform the technique for at least six consecutive months. After that time, you can open the jar and randomly read some of the things you wrote. Surely that moment will come back to you and enjoy it again.
With this simple technique you can achieve great things:
- To teach children to appreciate the little details that enrich life
- Teach children to practice gratitude, which will allow them to live with more satisfaction
- Gradually, they will learn to be fully present, as they will look for new reasons every day to feel happy
- They will develop positive habits that will serve them in the future to deal with problems with a more proactive attitude
Remember that the brain tends to focus more on the negative aspects rather than the positive ones, it often mulls over problems and their consequences, so it is important to teach children from an early age that the glass is not only half empty, but also half full.
