Parenting for Success

As a Discovery International School parent, committed to raising a confident, creative, resourceful child who is thriving in all aspects of his/her personal development and progress, you will be eager to learn how to best support your child through collaboration with your Discovery Team.

Here are some Essential Top Tips to parent successfully and to partner with us to achieve our shared vision of empowering your child to become a grounded and thoughtful leader who will transform Rwanda and the world!

Encouragement is Crucial: For our children to flourish and feel confident in their abilities as learners, they must believe in themselves. Support your child to be a confident learner who has healthy self-esteem. Use encouraging and supportive language when your child finds any aspect of learning challenging. Help your child to find new ways to learn and master the things that are particularly hard for them and remember to emphasise to your child that they cannot do something YET!

Deliberately Build a Growth Mindset: If you're familiar with the work of Professor Carol Dweck on 'Mindset', you will already be well aware that we all have underlying beliefs about the nature of ability. Children (and adults!) with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and abilities can be developed through effort, persistence, trying different strategies and learning from mistakes. As you support your child to make progress and to grow in confidence as they navigate their way through their world, be deliberate about praising your child's effort rather than his/her character or personality. Tell your child, 'You worked so hard on this; the results are great!' rather than, 'You're so clever!'.

Nurture a Constructive Culture Around Error: Very similar to, and entwined with, the importance of encouraging your child (and yourself!) to have a growth mindset, is to help them internalise that learning and growth is not a perfect path and they will fall, make mistakes and things can go wrong. In life, children can learn to "fail-forward" very early and learn to recover and refocus when they do not do well or when they do not achieve a desired goal. Refrain from shaming or punishing your child for lack of mastery or high performance, what they need is targeted support to get better where they need to develop, so that they learn exactly "how" to do better. When your child gets things wrong, use those moments as opportunities to learn more and to do something differently to achieve better results. Mistakes can lead to fun moments of analysis and creativity if they are approached within a constructive culture of error (where making mistakes can be seen as good opportunities for growth!!). Alternatively, your child could learn that mistakes always mean failure and the stakes are so high to 'get it right' that they could lose their self-confidence and their joy in learning!

Use Positive Behaviour Management Approaches: To complement the deliberate work that Discovery will be doing with your child, to support him/her to self-regulate as far as possible and to make the right behaviour choices in school, and beyond, you as parents should focus on highlighting and modelling the behaviours that you want your child to exhibit. For example, if you want your child to be patient and self-controlled, take every opportunity to model these behaviours and to address instances where your child becomes impatient or behaves impulsively with him/her. Use questions to get your child to think about what he/she has done that's wrong. Focus on building your child's empathy, as he/she starts to see how their actions (or omissions) will have affected other people. Do this through questioning, supporting your child to find the 'right' answers, and through gentle prompts to lead them to the point where they understand who their poor behaviour affects, in what way(s) and why.

When Correcting Your Child Do:

• Maintain your own calm so that you can listen and guide tour child to better behaviour.

• Focus on your child's behaviour, not his/her character or personality! Don't state general, negative things about your child such as, 'You're naughty,' or 'That's rude.' Instead name your child's specific behaviour(s) and the precise consequences of those poor/inappropriate behaviours. Then explain to your child what he/she could have done instead and how that would have led to a different, better outcome.

• Hear your child's perceptions of what has happened and maybe why it happened. This will make your child feel listened to, understood and also responsible! When you listen, avoid being judgemental or shutting your child down.

• Build their capacity for empathy; Coach your to child to think about how his/her behaviour has affected others; him/herself, you, other family members, friends... This builds empathy.

• Have clear and consistent consequences for unacceptable behaviours, that are in line with the mistake your child has made. The consequence should be appropriate for the poor behaviour; start small and work up to more serious consequences. If you start with your biggest consequence you have nowhere to go to next!

• Be specific and stay focused on the incident that has happened; avoid generalising or referring to other issues that have arisen at other times.

• Frequently aim to catch your child when she/he does well. Be sure to celebrate more times than you correct them or criticise them. Take note when your child does things right! Catch him/her being good and highlight how you appreciate it. Remember to focus on the behaviour, not your chid's character traits when you praise too!

• Always aim for win-win outcomes; try use the Restorative Parenting approaches to managing conflicts and challenges, for better long-term impacts on your children's ability to make good behaviour choices for themselves.

When Correcting Your Child Do Not:

• Do not lose your cool! Remember you're the adult :) Take the role of a calm coach and coach your child towards improvement

• Do not use fixed mindset comments such as, 'You're bad,' or 'You're lazy,' or 'You always make these mistakes.' These statements label your child and make him/her feel as if they have no way to change or improve their behaviour.

• Do not be negative about your child's character or personality; focus on behaviours. Behaviour can be changed!

• Do not say things that will make your child lose self-esteem.

• Do not give consequences that are inappropriate and harsh such as those that might be abusive; physically, emotionally or psychologically.

Be Involved and Present: After a tiring, busy day, parents have to be deliberate about getting involved with their child's day-to-day experiences. Set aside time to interact with your child everyday/evening when you have no distractions. Switch off devices (television, internet-enabled devices, phones...) and chat with your child. Find put how their day has gone, what great questions they asked at school, what new things they learned, what interested or bothered them. Speaking and listening together regularly will build your child's confidence.

Read with your child every day. If your child is not yet reading, read to him/her and talk about the illustrations in the books. Make up your own original stories that are inspired by the illustrations or by their favourite cartoon/fairytale/storybook characters! This is a fun, creative outlet for you, as a parent! If your child is already reading confidently, alternate the reading between you, with each of you taking a turn to read aloud.

Don't forget to ask questions about what you read; this will help your child to develop their higher-order thinking skills as they analyse, look for what's implied and think creatively about what they read.

As we navigate your child's learning journey together it will be most impactful if we align the practices that are used at school and home, to bring about consistent and positive growth opportunities. We all have to guard against repeating the negative practices we might have been subjected to, in days gone by, as we can often revert to the defaults we remember, when we're faced with challenging scenarios with our children.

Above all, remember to love and enjoy parenting as it's undoubtedly the best 'job' in the world!

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