Interesting Psychology Team
Child Motivation is an influence that affects why you choose to do something, how long you choose to do it, and how hard you are going to pursue it. In order to figure out what motivates children, you need to understand why they may be willing to make all the effort required by self-regulation. There are two categories of motivation: internal or external.
CHILD INTERNAL MOTIVATION
Internal morals are your natural way to do something, guided by unseen forces that we now know are neural networks that drive the character of a person.
Children internalize behavioral standards and know how to comply with them, keeping their behavior within them to a kind of moral compass. Children can internalize their “mommy” rules and comply with behavioral standards. When motivations line up and you have a compliant child, parenting can be easy.
But what if the moral compass of your child points elsewhere? To be sure, it is a valuable thing to internalize the ideals that parents think are important, but there must be a way to instill our morals in children who have different goals and still value their point of view.
Take Pietro:
He has very strong moral ideals of his own, and they are not always in line with those of other people. He has a very developed sense of fairness and often roots in a loyal and caring way for the underdog, but it can blind him to people’s feelings that he thinks are already on top.
Pietro’s mother, Julia, will have to work with him continuously on aspects of empathy because he has empathy in great quantities in some situations, while in others it seems to be absent. She’s going to model it, scaffold it, do it. She will have to work with him on it more than with her other children.
For example,
One morning when Pietro ended up “unloading a dishwasher” as his morning job, he threw a temper tantrum. It was obvious to Julia that at least part of his temper tantrum was fake, but two of his three siblings felt bad enough to offer to switch jobs with him. To manipulate them, was he throwing a tantrum? Certainly. But he wielded a superpower as well: empathy.
The word manipulation reminds us of everything we usually associate with empathy that is the opposite. But there is a very close relationship between manipulation and empathy. It is a carefully orchestrated brain performance not only to be aware of the feelings of others, but also to be aware of how your actions can change those feelings.
When Pietro was a 2-year-old, he was a little young to have a rational conversation about each behavior’s pros and cons, although Julia certainly tried to have such conversations. But now that he’s 11, she’s tired of repeating the same things to him constantly. Julia begins to feel like she’s doing something wrong.
Pietro has become the little boy sitting in a corner and thinking to himself, “Yes, it was worth it.” Meanwhile, all around him is crying.
Julia always tells Pietro that he should use his powers for good rather than evil. He may not fully understand what she means by that, but he will do so with repetition and examples. She can move her highly cognitively empathic child from being a “manipulator” to being a “leader” by teaching him to be thoughtful about any action.
Julia knows that the shift can be made by Pietro. But how does she want to make him do it? Starting from the ground up, she can work by practicing empathy to build up her valuation system. To help him solve conflicts, she can capitalize on the fact that creativity is one of his strong points. The rules and standards that are acceptable in society can be made clear to her,
Model what to do and have clear consequences rules.
It will take a large part of early childhood to present children with alternatives to wrong ways of behaving and ask them to choose differently. Meanwhile, however, Pietro needs more work. Julia has something else to figure out. And so do all the other low-motivation children’s parents. When there is no overflowing internal motivation, Parents have other ways to help them along, and this is where external motivation is useful.
CHILD EXTERNAL MOTIVATION
External motivation is exactly what it sounds like: children are doing things outside of themselves for a reason. External motivation is where kids know how to behave and then choose the “reward” for good behaviour.
One of the most important things we can do as parents is to encourage our children (with practice) to move things gradually from the bucket of external motivation to the bucket of internal motivation. When things are second nature to us, things become internal. And when we practice them, they become habits. By using tools to encourage self-regulation behaviors, we can help our children practice.
