Have you ever met a stranger, a friend of whoever it is, and they have a little kid with them, and they start telling you what a brat their kid is? We were going home after having dinner at Mid Valley last night, and at the Parking ticket machine, we saw a little girl with her grandparents, so we smiled at them, and straight away the grandmother said, “She’s a rotten egg!”
So we were like, “Oh, okay..”. There goes the conversation. The little girl cling closely to her grandfather and stared at us forlornly. She was big enough to understand what her grandmother was saying. It made me feel quite sad, coz she was beautiful and I can’t see anything rotten about her.
There seems to be this Asian superstition that we shouldn’t praise our kids ourselves, be it saying they are good to saying they are cute. We are supposed to say bad things about them, whether true or not, to project some sense of humility, in my opinion, a false sense of humility. If we as parents do not praise our kids rightly, then who will? Won’t they grow up with a complete lack of trust and confidence? Saying things like they are bad, rotten and stupid is like a curse to me, because the more you say it, it might eventually come true. Instead, it would be better to bless them to be the person God made them to be, even if it has not come true yet. Surely little kids are all naughty to some extend, and discipline needs to come in. However, when they are good, they do deserve some praises and blessing from the older ones so they know how to differentiate good and bad.
Words of encouragement from the parents make a whole lot of difference. When I was little, and my dad praised me for being good at something, I would be so motivated to work doubly hard at it. However, when I bring him good results and he said I didn’t do good enough, I totally lost the motivation to try the next time, coz I thought it didn’t matter to him. I guess giving words of encouragement applies to anybody of any age not just to little kids, but it’s so important to kids, coz so much of their future can depend on just that one word of encouragement. Imagine someone come out to you one day, and tell you, “You’re going to be great one day, you’re going to be a history maker and a life changer.” I would say wow, how much that would stir me up from thinking I am nothing but the person behind the computer on a desk. Try blessing someone today with a word of encouragement, we all need it! 🙂