Posted on 1 Comment

The Half Full or Half Empty Child

Are you raising a positive child or a negative child? As their parent, you will help determine their outlook on life and, in part, it is as simple as your word choices. "No" falls so easily from our lips. As a parent, we have to deny our children often but do we have to say no? Instead we could give them alternatives, or we could redirect in a positive way but right now I want to focus purely on word choice. Consider this sentence:

Don’t touch that!

How many times a day? We say "don’t touch that" for safety, control, and sanity. "Don’t," contraction for "do not," is negative purely because not is a negator. Consider this sentence:

Leave that alone!

Same connotation but "leave that alone" is a positive statement. It is a doing statement. By using a sentence without the word "not" you have given your child a positive statement. By using an action word, you are teaching your child to be proactive. "Leave" gives the child an action where as a sentence with "not" generally gives the child an action to avoid.

Using positive words instead of negative words can help your child be happier, confident, self-sufficient, and will create the foundation for their future interpretation of life events. As adults, think about how dejected and beat down we feel from constant rejection and negativity. Our children need to hear positive words!

That last sentence could have been phrased, "Our children should not hear negative words." I challenge you to watch for opportunities to turn your speech positive. An easy way to begin is to drop the word "not" from your vocabulary.

1 thought on “The Half Full or Half Empty Child

  1. […] Earlier I wrote about speaking positively to your child. The next step comes from some comedic training I had under David Brian Alley who trained in Second City with the i.O. under Del Close and Charna Halpern (the teachers of most of the Saturday Night Live greats!). […]

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.