Helping Your Child Develop Their Willpower
There is no better time than right after Halloween to help your children develop their willpower. While parents try to outsmart their kids by “checking” the bags of candy before kids can access it, today’s kids are far smarter than we give them credit for. They are clever enough to find ways to hide enough candy under their beds and in their drawers to satisfy them for weeks without parents ever knowing.
This is often a parent’s first lesson in developing their child’s willpower. You can’t outsmart willpower and you can’t force a child to do the right thing when no one is looking.
Willpower is simply the idea that one can control an impulsive temptation to behave badly by exercising mental restraint. However, the idea that a behavior is “bad” is a character judgement. This judgement at the moment when one needs willpower creates a compulsive relationship between willpower and character.
Character is the mental, moral, and ethical qualities that define an individual. Although the term character is singular, it implies a plurality of these qualities. Qualities we all use to judge whether we believe something is good or bad. These judgements are then used to formulate the rules we follow to define our individual character qualities.
Develop a Child’s Character to Develop Their Willpower
For willpower to become a factor in a choice a child is making, there must be a character rule the child is attempting to follow to define them as a person.
For example, if your child doesn’t think there is a rule that prevents them from eating an entire bag of Halloween candy, they will do this and feel totally fine about it. On the other hand, if your child thinks that behavior is unhealthy or undisciplined, no matter how good the candy taste they will use their willpower to moderate themselves or at least feel bad about it if they don’t.
With this in mind, willpower is not what will actually stop your child from eating all of the candy. Willpower is only a conduit for the power of their beliefs. It’s their beliefs about “what is bad”, “not that bad”, and “okay just this one time” that powers their willpower. These beliefs come from the character traits that you instill in them through your parenting. In addition, these character traits come with a set of rules that you enforce, and that society enforces.
In short, to develop a child’s willpower you must start by developing their character, their beliefs about their character, and the rules they follow to support their character. Therefore, the only way to change a child’s willpower is to change what they believe about their character.