Educating to form independent and autonomous children

Make children and adolescents become independent and autonomous people It is one of the main objectives that fathers and mothers have set at some point in their lives.

And the truth is that although this process of educating young people to be freer sounds very good, it is not a bed of roses, and many times it presents great difficulties: rebel teenagers who prefer not to make an effort, fathers and mothers who unconsciously sabotage their children's attempts to do things autonomously, lack of guidelines to follow, etc.

• Related article: "Toxic Families: 4 Ways They Cause Mental Disorders"

I will show below keys to understand what the learning and education process should be like to train children and young people to be more independent.

Keys to educate in autonomy centered on parents

Part of the changes to be made to promote the independence of the little ones must be made in the way of thinking and in the behavior of the adults who care for them. These are the guidelines to keep in mind.

1. believe in your ability

The first step in facilitating the autonomous learning process of children and adolescents is believe that they are capable of carrying it out. Something that seems very simple in writing but, in reality, is not so simple; It means seeing with different eyes both the behavior of children and the role of oneself as father, mother or legal guardian.

A young person will not begin to act autonomously if the implicit message communicated by the person encouraged to do so is that this is a task that someone else must do for him, giving him orders or deciding what should be done.

2. lose fear of the situation

Many fathers and mothers stop their children's autonomous learning unconsciously because they are afraid of what might happen. As the existence of an independent daughter or son supposes that one loses control over what this person does, pessimistic ideas about what might happen can frequently assail our imaginations. For example, one thinks about the dangerous friendships that can be made, the drug use that can be exposed, the accidents that can be suffered by not being careful, etc.

These ideas have such a strong emotional impact that when parents see their sons or daughters beginning to gain independence, your attention is focused on these catastrophic thoughts, as if their existence were in itself a real danger. From there you move on to rumination, that is, looping thinking about what causes stress: in this case, the (relative) dangers of having more independent sons or daughters than before. Adults feel bad because they imagine those situations, and they imagine those situations because they feel bad.

To solve this, it is necessary to go through two phases:

restructuring of ideas

It must be clear that the dangers faced by self-employed people due to the fact that they do not have surveillance constant of a protective figure are very relative, and that the real possibilities that those omens are fulfilled are very low. On the other hand, remember that the far more likely danger is raising a daughter or a son who remain helpless even when he has long since entered adulthood, if he does not change his attitude.

break rumination

Managing the initial stress that in some cases can mean giving children and adolescents more autonomy becomes necessary in some cases. To do this, you can read this article about what rumination is and how it can be neutralized.

3. Admit the need to try harder

Educating independent sons and daughters is one more task within the series of activities involved in educating the new generations and, therefore, requires extra effort. While it may seem like constantly checking up on little ones and teens is a major hassle, it really isn't: helping children become empowered means teaching them the tools to do so, and that is something that costs, especially when beginning.

On the other hand, impatience and the desire not to spend much time on an activity that is being learned makes many parents prevent possibility of learning fundamental tasks such as dressing or bathing, in younger children, or going out to buy and keeping some savings, in teenagers. That is why you have to keep in mind that the first times are always slow and difficult, and that you "accelerate" those moments by intervening yourself on what the young person should be doing is a way of sabotaging learning, however convenient it may be for their own comfort.

For this reason, parents and caregivers must take into account that many times the lack of initiative and autonomy of their children stems from the fact that they themselves prefer to continue exercising control, because that is more comfortable and simple, and what that attitude causes attempts to behave independently to be rejected and punished.

4. Knowing how to detect requests for independence

In their position as people who really know what is going on better than the children they educate, Parents and guardians often underestimate their own criteria and the requests of the little ones, believing that they know how to interpret what they really want better than them. This reasoning is fallacious and, furthermore, it is a way of creating a series of ideas about one's relationship with children that will never be challenged or forced to adapt to the rhythm of their growth.

When a child says "by myself" while doing a task that she is learning, the caregiver or caregiver spend at least a few seconds thinking about whether or not it is really reasonable to oppose this request. is. In the same way, it must be borne in mind that the requests for autonomy by the little ones are very diverse and, in some cases, subtle, and that it is necessary to develop a certain sensitivity to know detect them.

Strategies for educating in independence focused on young people

Now that we have seen what attitude adults should adopt when educating young people and children to be independent, Let's see how change can be promoted in these last.

1. spend more time together

Something as simple as spending more time with young people is an ingredient that promotes learning exponentially. Of course, They must be moments in which the shared time is of quality: being in the same room watching two different screens counts, because there is no dialogue.

The conversations and games that appear spontaneously in these contexts are a source of knowledge that make the youngest see the world with different eyes, consider new unknowns and become interested in more topics. The latter is fundamental, since curiosity is the engine of learning.

2. Find out about their likes and interests

The most effective way to get children and young people interested in learning new activities that give them more autonomy is to relate them to the topics that interest them, either creating narratives in which topics of interest and those that must be learned are framed, or exercises in which both elements are found.

3. Experiment with reward systems

In some cases, incentive systems similar to the token economy can be useful to boost learning and independence: Every time significant enough progress is made, a reward is given that should not be delayed.

The ideal is that the rewards are scarce and more symbolic than material, since in this way they symbolize the achievement of a series of competencies. and abilities that are a consequence of learning itself, instead of being something totally unrelated to it and, therefore, are more related to learning. intrinsic motivation.

This strategy, added to the previous one, can make the incentives more attractive. For example, if the boy or girl is very interested in fictions based on a magical world, the rewards can be medals related to those fictional universes.