The Optimistic Child Pdf Download
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Jonas Salk was my childhood hero, and long into my own professional life as a psychologist, his way of doing science was my model: not knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge in the service of healing. By exposing children's bodies to tiny, manageable doses of polio, Salk had made their immune systems more capable of fighting off the real thing. He had taken the new, pure science of immunology and applied it successfully to the worst epidemic of our time.
We want more for our children than healthy bodies. We want our children to have lives filled with friendship and love and high deeds. We want them to be eager to learn and be willing to confront challenges. We want our children to be grateful for what they receive from us, but to be proud of their own accomplishments. We want them to grow up with confidence in the future, a love of adventure, a sense of justice, and courage enough to act on that sense of justice. We want them to be resilient in the face of the setbacks and failures that growing up always brings. And when the time comes, we want them to be good parents. Our fondest hope is that the quality of their lives will be better than our own, and our inmost prayer is that our children will have all of our strengths and few of our weaknesses.
All this we should be able to achieve. Parents can teach confidence, initiative, eagerness, kindness, and pride. What's more, most American children are now born into a time of enormous opportunity: they live in a very powerful and wealthy country, where people enjoy unprecedented individual liberties and choices; as the shadow of nuclear war recedes, science and medicine continue to make major advances; and communications networks span a global village of books, music, games, trading, and knowledge. So, if we are good parents and if today's world is a better place for children, we have good reason to expect their lives to surpass ours in every way.
There is, however, a serious obstacle that threatens to dash these hopes. It is eroding our children's natural state of activity and optimism. The unvarnished word for it is pessimism. It boils down to this: dwelling on the most catastrophic cause of any setback. Pessimism is fast becoming the typical way our children look at the world. A crucial task for you as a parent is to prevent your children from absorbing this trendy outlook, and the mission of this book is to teach you how you can bring up your children so that they will enjoy a lifetime of optimism.
Why would you want your children to be optimists Pessimism, you may think, is just a posture, a mental costume you can take off at will. If pessimism were simply a ploy for appearing sagacious at cocktail parties, or a sour grapes posture to protect yourself from disappointments, I would not have written this book. But pessimism is an entrenched habit of mind that has sweeping and disastrous consequences: depressed mood, resignation, underachievement, and even unexpectedly poor physical health. Pessimism is not shaken in the natural course of life's ups and downs. Rather, it hardens with each setback and soon becomes self-fulfilling. America is in the midst of an epidemic of pessimism and is suffering its most serious consequence, depression.
This book narrates the story of the resulting immunization program for school children. Again, the specific purpose of this book is to teach parents, coaches, teachers, and entire school systems how to imbue children with a sense of optimism and personal mastery. I will do this by telling you about the studies of optimism and helplessness that my colleagues and I have carried out over the past thirty years. I will tell you about pessimism's sources and its insidious consequences. I will explain how to tell if your child is showing danger signs, and then how to change his pessimism into optimism and his helplessness into mastery.
Unlike most child-rearing or self-improvement books, this book is not just opinion combined with clinical lore. Advice on crucial issues such as breast-feeding versus bottle-feeding, discipline versus freedom, daycare versus full-time mothering, home schooling, androgyny, the impact of divorce, the devastation wrought by sexual abuse, and sibling rivalry has been freely and loosely dispensed to the public by experts. Worse, many parents have gobbled up this advice and changed their child-rearing practices based on weak evidence, ideology, and mere clinical hunches.
Footless advice is easy to believe when there is little hard data about children. But the situation, fortunately, has now changed. The last decade has seen large-scale, careful research that has reshaped the landscape of child rearing. The advice in this book, the programs I present, the underlying theory of optimism and personal control, and the tests you will be giving your children are based on three decades of painstaking research with hundreds of thousands of adults and children. When my advice is speculation or based just on my own clinical or parental wisdom (I do have five children), I will so label it.
My book is aimed at all parents, from residents of the wealthiest suburb to the poorest neighborhood, and at all children, from the cradle until the end of adolescence. I have a more ambitious purpose as well. If America's pessimism does not change, our liberty, our wealth, and our power will be of little use. A nation of pessimists will not seize the opportunities that the twenty-first century has to offer. We will lose our economic edge to more-optimistic nations. We will lack the initiative to achieve justice at home, and our children will come to adulthood in a country crippled by sterile self-absorption and mired in passivity and gloom.
Eighteen months old, Robert is Jessica and Joe's first child. They are in awe of their son, dumbfounded by the things Robert can do, amazed at what he understands and what he can communicate. At dinner, as Robert smushes his head in the applesauce and crams gigantic pieces of cornbread into his mouth, Jessica tells Joe the latest Robert story.
Like most parents of young children, Jessica is constantly scanning the world for dangers to Robert. She did not want Robert to play behind the couch because there were too many electric cords. She tried to block his path. Robert, however, saw this as a challenge and, with determination, figured out ways to master the situation. Jessica could have scolded Robert because he would not stop trying to get behind the couch; after all her goal was to keep him from playing there. However, rather than scold Robert, Jessica recognized that Robert was seeing the obstacles as challenges to overcome, so she chose to share in his adventure and pride. She congratulated him on his accomplishment and then re-created the challenge for him in a safer environment. In doing this, Jessica helped her son feel masterful, and abided by her philosophy to constantly create new opportunities for mastery for her child.
Second, to make Ian feel better, Dad takes over and builds Ian the rocket ship Ian cannot make for himself. Dad is sending the message When things don't go as you want, give up and let someone else rescue you. In trying to build Ian's self-esteem, his dad has taught him a lesson in helplessness. There is nothing wrong with letting Ian fail. Failure, in itself, is not catastrophic. It may deflate self-esteem for a while, but it is the interpretation your child makes of the failure that can be more harmful. Dad should sympathize with Ian and validate his feelings, making it clear he knows just how bad Ian feels (When I was seven, I remember how awful I felt the time I built a kite and it blew into fourteen pieces the moment my dad and I tried to fly it.). But Dad should not solve Ian's problem for him.
But pessimism is a trait that psychologists have discovered how to change. Cognitive psychology has developed a powerful technology for changing the maladaptive thinking habits that many people fall into when they fail. These techniques can be taught by parents and turn out to work especially well for school-age children. The techniques of changing pessimism into optimism are the fulcrum that I use to immunize children against depression.
Meet Tamara, who unlike Ian is being immunized against depression by her mother. Tamara's mom does not make the mistakes that Ian's dad does, and Tamara is acquiring an optimistic theory of herself. When she encounters setbacks, which she does as often as Ian, she has learned to bounce back. Instead of trying to make Tamara feel better by denying reality, Tamara's mom validates Tamara's disappointment and teaches her perseverance and active problem solving. She also guides Tamara in explaining her failures optimistically and accurately.
At seven, Tamara is much heavier than most girls her age and is less coordinated than the other children in the neighborhood. Her mom enrolls her in a ballet class to help her develop better motor skills. Tamara is thrilled and can't wait to start. The week before the program begins, Tamara and her mom go shopping for dance clothes. Tamara picks out a pink leotard and skirt and white ballerina slippers. Every night, Tamara pulls on her ballerina outfit and dances around the house. Look, Mommy! I am a pretty ballerina. I can't wait to take my lessons so I can be a real ballerina. When I grow up I'm going to be the best dancer in the world!
Wrosch and Scheier [34] evidenced two variables capable of influencing quality of life: optimism and adaptation of purpose. Both in fact exert a fundamental role in adaptive management of critical circumstances in life and of goals to reach. There is evidence that optimistic people present a higher quality of life compared to those with low levels of optimism or even pessimists [37, 38]. It has been demonstrated that in the presence of severe pathological conditions, optimistic patients adapt better to stressful situations compared to pessimists, with positive repercussions on their quality of life. For example, in a sample of patients who underwent an aortic-coronary bypass, optimism was significantly and positively associated with quality of life in the six months following the operation [39]. The optimistic patients in fact presented a more rapid clinical improvement during the period of hospitalization and a quicker return to daily routine after discharge from hospital. Analogous results are reported in samples of patients with other pathologies. In patients affected with epilepsy, Pais-Ribeiro et al. [40] found that optimists showed an improved perception of their physical and mental state of health and reported higher quality of life compared to pessimists. Kung et al. [41] examined the relation between optimism-pessimism and quality of life in patients with cancer of the neck, head or thyroid. In all the subjects, optimism was associated with better quality of life in both the scales of the physical and mental components of the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) [42], in six of the eight subscales of the SF-12 (12-item Short Form Health Survey) [43] and of the SF-36 (36-item Short Form Health Survey) [44]. 153554b96e
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