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Is your child a “healthy striver”?

Being a pediatrician doesn’t make you a perfect mom. Just ask my 12 and 15-year-old. I must admit, this weekend’s CNBC article was a good reminder to hold my barrage of questions about classes and grades and instead focus on really getting to know the big humans my little ones have become.

In the article centered around raising successful kids by parenting researcher and author Jennifer Wallace, she discusses a previously known psychological trait called “mattering,” which is “the idea of feeling valued by family, friends, and community for who you are deep at your core, and being relied on to add meaningful value back to your family, to your schools, to your communities.”

There is a correlation between healthy levels of teenage self-esteem and feeling “like they mattered to their parents, that they were important and significant,” she says. She adds that’s the feeling you want to enforce as a parent.

“Mattering acts like a protective shield that buffers against stress, anxiety, and depression,” Wallace says. “It wasn’t that these healthy strivers that I met didn’t have setbacks or failures. But mattering acted like a buoy. It lifted them up [and] made them more resilient.”

Children get more confidence from being known and understood by their parents than from receiving direct praise, according to research conducted by Harvard child psychologist Richard Weissbourd.

Read the entire interview here:
https://lnkd.in/gRKMGWc3