Negative thinking isn’t something that just plagues adults. It also plagues kids.
In the book Freeing Your Child From Negative Thinking: Powerful Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness, child psychologist Tamar E. Chansky, Ph.D, writes that for kids with a “negative thinking bias,” negative thoughts become “the default, the first, last and final word.”
Kids simply don’t realize that they have a choice in whether they internalize these thoughts. Instead, they start to see these inaccurate beliefs as absolute truths.
Fortunately, Chansky says that parents can help! Whether your child expresses negative thoughts occasionally or on a regular basis, you can help them overcome these harmful patterns of thinking. Below are three activities to try with your kids.
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Good article! These are even points that i can use as an adult and share with my clients!
This is really interesting. I absolutely love the bit where you can tell the negative part of the brain’you need new glasses’! I’m all grown-up but I think that might work with my brain too.
My daughter was having a period of time where she was feeling really down and negative, I think she was about 10-11 years at the time.
I set her a task to write a list of good things in her life and told her I would give her 20p for every one that she wrote up to a maximum of £5.
She wrote loads and even exceeded the £5 limit and thereafter was happier and more positive!
Its great article.I agree fully.once when my daughter was down with self doubt,I had asked her to write down all her good points,,,it worked .
So pay them to be happy?
Great Advice, although I would rather see an interest in changing the patterns that caused this mindset. It seems to be very common only differing in degree among the population.
I really don’t believe this is an inate tendency that we are born with but instead is conditioned state from experiences with parents with a much larger degree coming from the shcool systems currently in place.
Here in the west the entire focus seems to be indoctrinating us in each area with messages that inform us that we need to “make something of ourselves” with other messages that discount and are counter-intuitive to the “Being” that we already are, which we come to think is “nothing” if we don’t become something ever endeavouring to objectify the self fragmenting the life.
The experience of living in a society with foundational values placed on achievement of materialistic success with over emphasis’s on form in all it’s aspects and at every life stage. Having little trust in the natural unfolding of self, it’s wonder of discovery bringing passion to learn, was instead replaced by structured institutions enforced by reward and punishment using emotional manipulations in the form of labels which shamed or praised the “Being” in accordance to compliancy of “doing”. Constantly being told we must prepare for the future, we must refine and mold our character (mask) and in so doing have developed an obsession with an illusive time called future that by comparison came with an equally dead past completely missing the “Now” or the ability to live in it.
Not giving equal value to the emotional states along with encouraging introspective qualities has serious tragic consequences with most Americans being fragmented and mentally unstable.
This instability has yet to be adressed and what is considered emotional maturity in this country is really in truth emotional repression that unquestioned allows these states to perpetuate to future generations.
While I applaud the exercises given in this article it’s only a drop in the bucket in addressing our tragic lack of emotional maturity.
Our Societies over emphasis on the intellect produced tools that are completely inept even causing harm through evasive tactics concerning the rich emotional life its uses needed to navigate life , a rich motivational source is instead become a suppressed existence known only by its shadowy effects of chronic discontent giving rise to ongoing addictions to people, places and things.
Thanks for letting me rant
Laura
Brilliant!, thank you, thats a very interesting and thoughtful response Laura.
This is great! I have read lots of posts and these suggestions are different from any of the others I have tried. Can’t wait to see how they work.