Learning doesn’t happen overnight! It requires patience—a quality that tends to be rare or rather fleeting in kids. Fortunately, once impatient doesn’t necessarily mean always impatient. Using a few simple activities, you can help your child develop more patience, a virtue that will serve them well in school and throughout their life.
Forgetting things or having plans disrupted at the last minute can quickly lead to sour moods and outbursts. To avoid this, try establishing individual and family routines. Schedules are a highly effective way to help kids gain a better sense of time. They allow your child to do the following:
- Anticipate upcoming activities
- Make sure they have everything they need beforehand
- Understand that you can’t always be available
- Etc.
Individual routines for your child can include routines for after-school tasks (link in French), homework, and preparing their backpack. Your family routine, meanwhile, might include the following:
- A period set aside for homework time
- What time you make dinner or do the dishes
- Each family member’s activities (link in French)
- Etc.
Kids who are impatient may act out in various ways:
- Speaking out of turn
- Throwing tantrums
- Acting impulsively
- Never finishing tasks
- Etc.
Fortunately, no matter how your child’s impatience affects their behaviour, a bit of imagination is all it takes to come up with corrective strategies. The problems mentioned above, for example, could be addressed as follows:
- Problem: Speaking out of turn
Solution: Use a talking stick. Only the person holding the stick is allowed to speak. - Problem: Throwing tantrums
Solution: Help your child learn to recognize when they’re feeling frustrated and teach them a few breathing techniques. - Problem: Never finishing tasks
Solution: Divide homework time into several blocks and use a timer for motivation. - Etc.
If there’s one thing all beginners need, it’s patience! For this reason, you can help your child develop their patience by encouraging them to try lots of different activities. The important thing is for them to try something new, whether that means learning a sport, an artistic discipline, or a song, and to see it through to the end! There are various ways you can help them stay the course:
- Remind your child that it often takes a lot of practice to improve at something
- Set an example by diving into a new activity yourself and showing patience
- Explain that nothing’s more normal than failure
- Etc.
Patience is an important requirement in many games and activities. Solitaire, the well-known card game, is one of the first to come to mind, but there are also plenty of others your child can try:
- Origami
- Sewing
- Chess
- Crossword puzzles
- Knitting
- Gardening
- Sudoku
- Etc.
As with learning any other kind of behaviour, patience can be developed effectively using positive reinforcement. Celebrating your child’s victories, whether big or small, and focusing more on the effort they put in than on the outcome will help your child grow and learn to persevere.
Writing : The Alloprof Parents' team