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Is Quitting Becoming a Habit?
Posted: April 06, 2022
Is quitting a habit?
Does your child quit everything they start? Worse, do they not start things because they think they will quit?
We all quit things all the time. It doesn’t make us bad people.
However, when quitting becomes a habit we lose self-respect, and we lose the ability to make goals and grow. We lose self-esteem.
What we want to do is encourage our children to try as many things as they can to expand their abilities and so they can find what they like, but we need to also encourage completion, so they have a balance of trying but also finishing.
Letting our children try everything they are interested in is a good thing, letting them quit everything too soon is not.
Quitters are made just like winners.
How do you keep your child active, learning, and trying new things without accidentally teaching them the habit of quitting?
Easy the same way we do it at our academy.
Here is what we do to make sure the child doesn’t get the quitting habit.
- Trial
- Short Course (We call this an extended trial)
- Goal Course (We set a goal and we lay out what needs to be done then we reach the goal)
We have goal reviews every couple of weeks until the child understands how to reach and achieve the goal. This simple process helps children finish things. Even when a child quits our training, they have to complete their cycle and achieve the short-term goal. This is agreed upon by the student and parents and teachers. So, if they lose interest and really don’t like it, they still graduate from that section and leave knowing they completed their goal and moved on. They did not quit.
Time to take action.
- Encourage your child to try out everything they have or think they have an interest in.
- Agree upon a short tryout period that they must complete.
- After the tryout period, agree upon a longer one.
- Have an exit strategy just in case.
- Then stick to it.
Remember to celebrate every victory no matter how small. This builds the habit of completion.
Last words.
Forcing a child to finish something when they absolutely hate it can be detrimental to the growth of the child but so can letting them quit too early.
It’s not my intention to go into child motivation and habit forming but just to give you a little perspective of how we can get our children to stick to things and learn the habit of completion, not the habit of quitting.
What we know is that giving your child lots of activities and supporting them, as well as holding them accountable for their commitments, helps the child grow and find what they really like to do.
