Thoughts on Strength-Based Parenting

I’m excited to get to share a post today from my first guest writer! You can find Sarah over at Kids Who Shine. She is a coach who writes resources about Strength-Based Parenting and building resilience in kids and families.

When I was a child, I was lost. Even though I was nurtured and loved by my family, somewhere along the line, I lost sight of who I was at the core. Feelings of not being good enough, pretty enough or smart enough took over and I let fear drive my actions and choices, many of which weren’t great.

It’s taken me a long time to find my way back. I’m 40 now, married with three children and two companies.

When I decided to do the training to become a coach, I started thinking about who I was at my core, what my strengths were and how I could focus them on purpose – my purpose. That was about 10 years ago. Then, when I had my first child, the question of who I was started to really blossom. I thought deeply about what kind of world I wanted my children to grow-up in and how could I play my part in helping that happen. What were my strengths, and how was I going to use them!

My Signature Character Strengths are:

·         Love of learning

·         Love

·         Gratitude

·         Hope

·         Creativity

·         Curiosity

·         Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

They have changed a little over the past few years as I have changed some of my practices in life to include gratitude journaling, mindfulness, meditation and immersing myself in experiences of awe. I’m sure they will continue to change as I learn, grow and develop. However, I now find myself, consciously using my strengths and seeking to help others do the same. The internal pull is very strong – I want to live a purposeful life.

I believe children who learn to understand their strengths, who are given opportunities to express and explore, will land themselves in a stronger place in their teens. Their sense of identity will be stronger. If they are exploring and using their strengths, they will have greater life satisfaction and be more likely to be engaged in life. As they grow, this will translate into purposeful action to how they can help the world around them be a better place. Is that the kind of child you would like?

It Starts with Your Strengths

Close your eyes for a minute and think back to a time that you achieved something you were proud of, you performed at your best,  you felt energised and engaged, you may have even lost track of time while doing it. As you play the scene in your mind, think about:

• What strengths did you use?

• How did it make you feel?

Now, I’d like you to think about a challenge you overcame, what happened, and more specifically:

• What strengths did you use?

• How did they help you?

Generally, as we start to write about different events, further memories pop-up. The strengths we use in the proud moments and happy moments, are often the same strengths we draw on in the more challenging times.

So, pause for a minute and complete this sentence:

• When I’m at my best my strengths are?

• And I am using them doing…?

We all have strengths. They make us the unique people we are. I believe it’s important to use the gifts we’re given; they help us to bring out our best selves and the best in others.

To be a Strengths Based Parent, we need to understand what strengths look like in our own lives. We need to practice on ourselves. Then, we can start looking for and sharing with our children, the strengths they use. They too, will then start looking for their strengths and these can be shared, acknowledged, encouraged and explored to further develop them.

Why Strengths?

When we use strengths effectively, they can bring us energy and joy, build our resiliency (ability to bounce back) and help us solve problems, they help us build relationships, achieve goals, get fully engaged in life and increase our life-satisfaction. Strengths Matter.

Strengths are so important, yet because of our brain’s deficit bias; it’s tendency to look for what’s not working means we see more of what’s not working. We often focus on our weaknesses and potentially what we don’t like about ourselves (and others). Deficit thinking is limited thinking.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be like that. Our brains are like plastic and ready to be molded and changed. So, not only can we focus on strengths, we can focus on what is working in every area of our lives and do more of that. It is life changing.

How do you think a ‘what’s working’ approach could change your life?

5 Steps to Becoming a Strengths Based Parent

1.   Know, use and talk about your strengths

 To be a strength-based parent, it’s important to know, use and share stories and reflections on our strengths usage with our kids. If you’re unsure what your strengths are, there are numerous strengths surveys like VIA Strengths and Gallup Talents etc. They are great places to start, especially VIA as it’s free!

 If we appreciate how we work when we’re at our best, we can consciously use our strengths more often to bring greater engagement and fun into our lives and especially parenting. Which, as we all know can be challenging at times!

Tool: A couple of nights a week, journal how you used your strengths that day and the difference it made. Pick a story to share with your children.

If you need help in this area, at Kids Who Shine, we run coaching sessions for the Mums and Dads too, so feel free to connect with us here.

 2.    Be Present

The greatest thing we can provide our children with is our presence. With work pressures, technology and all the ‘busy’ things happening in our lives, it can be easy to fall into the trap of busy thinking. Being mindfully present with our children creates space to truly connect and see the strengths they are using. You can see when they are using their strengths optimally, overusing them and under using them!

Look for the times they are engaged in an activity (often it might be the one’s when we’re trying to get them moving but they are engrossed!).

Isa is my 6 year-old daughter. One of her talents is gymnastics. The world is her gymnastics playground. She is constantly looking for ways to express her talent, she has a yearning. When we put her into class, within four weeks, her teacher asked if she could try out for the performance team. She made the cut. At 5 YO, she was doing gymnastics sessions that were 3.5 hours long, by choice. She would come out bursting with energy, one day she even asked if she could go to bounce after! She would say the time flew by and often would surprise herself with what she had learned that day.

It’s her character that enables her performance. Her character strengths that help her even more. She is persevering, curious, and full of humour and zest. These all lend themselves to performance in gymnastics and other areas of her life.

Tool 1: While present, look for the indicators of Strengths use. Are they yearning, learning, experiencing energy, flow and glimpsing of excellence?[1] Do they yearn to use the strength (even if they don’t know it’s a strength yet), do they learn it quickly when doing it (mastery), are they energised by it, do you loose track of time (flow), and do they have glimpses of excellence. Did they surprise themselves (and maybe you) as to what they achieved?[i][ii]

Tool 2: Try setting an intention for your day. Also, I’m a believer in meditation. Even if it’s a couple of minutes here and there across the day. There is emerging research that five, one-minute meditation sessions across the day, every day, can change to our brain structure. Over time you can build the practice up.

3.       Strength Feedback - SEEC

Give Strength Based Feedback to your children. As you’re learning, you can write it down and then share it with your child. I’m a believer in face-to-face feedback. It needn’t be in the moment, it’s more about looking them in the eye, connecting and sharing the strengths you saw and the impact they had. Also, as an addition to the face-to-face, you can leave them little notes and use our dinner placemats to engage the family in giving strength-based feedback to each other. 

Tool: SEEC©

Download our free SEEC tool here

·         Strength: Name It

·         Example: Brief explanation of usage

·         Effect: What happened/what was the impact

·         Change or Continue

For the first month or so, I would only focus on optimal strength usage. Build up your practice and make sure your children really know what healthy strength usage looks like, feels like and sounds like. When you feel like you’re fluent in positive strength feedback, you can also use the model for the occasional times you would like to give constructive feedback to your child too.

Important Note: They key here for me is, we’re still putting on the lens of what works, so we can see more of it – this will help your children do more of it too. So, as much as possible, keep the focus on the behaviours that you would like to see more of; the strengths usage that is really enabling their performance and well-being.

4.       It Starts with Strengths Book

 Just like we did at the start of this blog, its important to help your children discover their own inner strengths. Our activity books are just the tool for that. The It Starts with Strengths book has over 50 pages of self-paced, discovery activities that are fun and help your children connect with strengths and understand why they are important. They help them understand what strengths they have, how they can use them in different ways and the impact they can have on their own well-being and the lives of others.

 Tool: Our, It Starts with Strengths Books. This link gives you a special NurseMomShop discount of 30% off! Also, Buy Two books and receive free postage.

5.   Spot-It: Bring It Into The Every Day

Strength spotting is so much fun. As a consultant, this has been a core tool I have used to help teams and organisations transform. When we start looking for strengths, it helps us understand the uniqueness of others. People grow empathy as they begin to understand how others think and feel differently to themselves. It enlivens people. This happens within the family unit too. As a family, you can start spotting each other’s strengths. You can use the SEEC feedback, have a strengths wall, use a family strengths journal, our placemats!

When you read a book, watch a TV show or movie, you can start to talk about what strengths the characters are using and how it helped (or hindered) them! Sports stars, singers, dancers; there are examples of strengths all around us. It’s like when you decide to buy a new car. If you hadn’t seen it before, now you’ll see it all the time! That’s strengths parenting. It’s a new way of thinking, a new lens to see life and our children through; a real way to build deep connection and enable you and your children/partner/family to be their best selves.

We would love to hear how you go. Please keep in touch either through insta or facebook @kidswhoshine, sign-up for our freebie at www.kidswhoshine.com or feel free to contact me directly sarah@kidswhoshine.com.

Remember: All NurseMom followers receive 30% off our:

·         It Starts with Strengths activity books (printed or downloadable)

[i] Waters, L. (2017) The Strength Switch. Penguin Random House Australia.

[ii] Reckmayer, M., & Robinson, J. (2016). Strengths Based Parenting: Developing Your Children’s Innate Talents. Gallup Press.