Building Powerful Kids - #2 Power of the Nickname
How do kids go from ambitions of being superheroes in Kindergarten to fears of failures in 12th Grade? Imagine what you would find walking into a typical Kindergarten class that has a costume party - a bunch of pumped up little doods with shields, bows, tiaras, magic wands running around a class room being awesome.
Imagine that same experience in a typical 12th grade class. You will generally find some people too cool to dress up (really a fear of failure), some kids pushing the line with whatever scantily clad costume they found at Walgreens, and very little physical motion. Maybe a few kids interacting with each other - but defiantly nobody running around the class being awesome, slaying dragons, destroying bad guys, jumping off of cliffs and resisting gravity.
What happens?
Reality? Growing up? 'maturity'?
I would suggest that for the most part kids get through the Kindergarten-12th Grade process without parents ascribing their identity. As a result they seek it out elsewhere, in social media, @ school, in a extracurricular (sports, school, selling drugs). And the result is generally a pretty blah kid with a pretty blah outlook.
As parents I would challenge you to call out who your kids are before they even get a chance to get to Kindergarten but especially after they start. One way I do that is by unique nicknames.
For my wife and I this got stimulated by reading the following Bible verse in Proverbs 22:6:
Train up a child in the way he should go,And when he is old he will not depart it
The verb used their in the Hebrew of to train up translates to build in their unique identity. So my wife and I started referring to our chillens with different nicknames that developed over our experiences with them in order to help call out and affirm our kids identity.
For example, my three older kids are a little more temperate then my youngest. Well my youngest is named Cole Banner (which can easily associate with The Hulk/Bruce Banner). Early on I started referring to him as Cole the Monster. Because he was loud obnoxious and destructive. When he turned two I thought to myself, wow dont want this kids to grow up this way - he is not actually created to be destructive, so instead we have started calling him Cole the Mighty. He will consistently hear from me (on almost a daily basis) that he is not only Mighty but built to be a blessing to people.
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For my 2nd child - he had some weird fear responses early on, and can be a bit of eccentric kid. He is very social and loves engaging new people, however we found early on, he would get shut down when he perceives rejection or he feels he's in an environment where he is not skilled or doesn't know what to do. So we started calling him 'Jack the Brave' - one who slays the lions of society and the giants in the land. While thats kinda long - we usually just say Jack the Brave. He hears that several times a day, and its his frame of reference when he interacts with me or his mom (his siblings even start using that...which is awesome). So in moments of fear, or in parenting moments we are generally able to go back to his identity to help him develop the courage to confront his conflict. If its talking to a bully, or owning up to a mistake - Jack the Brave is learning a mindset of tackling giants, and will be a powerful kid come the end of 12th grade.
My hope for you today - is that as you are building powerful kids you would be able to call out their unique identity early on. You as parent are the responsible party to build that foundation. Use unique nicknames if it helps. Its been awesome for my kids.
Society will gladly try and ascribe something to your kid...my take is what society thinks is not going to be super helpful for my 6 or 7 year old - I can do it just fine.
Be mom be dad - use nicknames if it helps!
Thanks for reading along - don't fear failure - rather fail forward...its easier
live big and dominate the day
I love this post for multiple reasons. The first is the idea. When you continuously give people positive feedback their self confidence increases. My son is afraid of the dark, I am gong to have to come up with a name to reinforce how brave he is in the dark.
The second reason is Calvin and Hobbs! When I was in university with @lukestokes we had stumbled on a website that had the entire series published on comic at a time. This may seem like no big deal now but in the 1998 there weren't a lot of websites dedicated to these things. I believe we read the entire series and would share the ones that made us laugh (which was many).
the best reading material of all time...
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STOPThat's a part of "my" concept of parenting too. A child will be what it is called most often. If you tell them stuff like: "You are not able to do this!", "You are too weak!" or similar things, they one day will believe, that they are too weak or can't do whatever they wanted to do.
But if you say: "Hey, good idea. Let's try!", even though you know, they are too small and won't be able to do this very thing, they wanted to do, they gain a ton of confidence. And when they fail, you just say: "Wow, well done. But we have to work on that, so you even will be able to do it better." They learn, that they have to be persistent, without you ever directly teaching them this value.
I remember, when my oldest son was 12 or 13, he took a lens and a handful of dried grass and sit in the sun for hours to kindle a fire. After 3 hours his mother said: "Tell him, that it won't work!" But I said: "Let him, he will see whether it works or not." Well, at that night we had BBC... on the fire he kindled.
The same with nicknames, they had childhood heroes and used to play them and calling each other by their heroes names, so we just did the same, and called them by their heroes names.