You might want to stop giving up on tasks when your baby is around, since this might convince him to do the same when he grows up. A recent research discovered teaching persistence to a child is most effective if they see their parents struggling with a difficult task and not giving up on it.
Babies learn persistence from their parents
Researchers suggest hard work is the key for a proper education of your child. Recent research suggests this is the best method to teach babies persistence so, if you have an infant aged around 15 months, the best way to teach him that is to see you keeping up with hard tasks. When they see that, apart from imitating the parent’s behavior, they learn it as a life lesson.
Researchers from MIT took 262 infants with an average age of 15 months, and had them watch an adult performing two tasks. The first task consisted of taking a rubber frog out of a container, and the other one removing a keychain. Then, they showed babies a music box which got activated if they pressed a red button.
Babies need to see their parents struggle to get a task done
During the first experiment, the adult struggled to perform the tasks while, in the second one, he effortlessly removed the frog or the keychain. Then, the persistence of the babies was measured after they were encouraged to press the button until they open the music box.
Babies tended to be more patient and persistent with the task they had been assigned if they saw the adult take more time until he managed to unhook the chain or remove the frog from the box. After seeing the researchers struggle, they pressed the button of the music box about 23 times. If they saw him performing the task with no efforts, they gave up after 12 presses.
Infants borrow most behaviors from their parents. Therefore, seeing them trying hard to get things done can really teach the little ones persistence, and they are more likely to keep this behavior for the rest of their lives.
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