Parents Must Not Fight Against What Drives Their Child – Do This Instead
Drive is the intersection of passions with the desire to fulfill an innate need such as social bonding, independence, or competition for example. Drive is not something you can stimulate artificially. A person either has the drive to do something or they don’t.
With this in mind, parents must pay special attention to the innate needs and passions that drive their child most often. Specifically, parents should do their best not to fight against it.
For example, many kids have a natural drive to play video games such as Fortnite. So much so that the World Health Organization added “Gaming disorder” as an official mental health condition and is recognizing video-game addiction as a public health crisis.
If you are a parent of a child driven to play video games, it’s not helpful to force them to stop playing without providing an alternative that fills the void. The best thing you can do is find out what innate need and passion the child is fulfilling. Is it acceptance, independence, power, social bonding, competition, or a combination? Once you find this out, then you can work to fill the void with an alternative “real world” activity. Something in that sweet spot of what drives them and is beneficial to their long term goals.
Furthermore, even if your child is not facing a crisis such as video-game addiction, understanding what drives them is foundational for strengths based parenting. A child is at their best when they’re using their strengths. Thus, the better a parent understands what drives their child, the more they can activate the child’s strengths to help them be at their best.