How To Raise A Happy Genius

When they hear the word ‘Mantra’, many people will instantly think of ageing hippies, management consultants who spout more-or-less empty platitudes or over-eager personal trainers shouting things like ’No pain, no gain!’ as they encourage you to stretch your body to the point where the pain you’re left feeling definitely doesn’t result in any short-term, or long-term, gain. However, in the last few years, the term ‘Mantra’ has started to take on a new, and much more useful, meaning, and it is one that’s firmly rooted in the most recent advances in our understanding human psychology. These are the modern mantras that act as quick reminders of life lessons we’ve learned and positive psychological approaches to life that we should try to maintain if we wish to be happy and successful. Such modern mantras are now regularly being employed by sports psychologists and cognitive behavioural therapists to make a real difference to people’s lives, whether this is winning Olympic gold, or just helping people feel a little bit  better about themselves (and their past) on a daily basis. Thus, these modern mantras can be viewed not as the empty aphorisms of old, but rather as powerful tools in a psychological tool kit that can help people cope with many of the more difficult aspects of everyday life.

Such modern, psychologically-based, mantras are particularly well-suited to encouraging children to develop a range of important core life skills and help them encode positive lessons they learn from life into their own future behaviours and responses. In particular, well-worded modern mantras are a great way to encourage children to develop two key psychological tools that, together, probably have a far greater influence on their future happiness and success than almost anything else you can instil in them. These are self-control (also know as the ability to delay gratification) and a growth mindset.

In terms of promoting the development of growth mindsets, there are a few mantras I use with children on a regular basis. The first of these is ‘Try twice before asking for help.’ I use this in almost any situation where I see a child who is prone to giving up the moment things gets even remotely difficult or challenging. This can be when they are trying to do anything from sticking a straw in a juice box to putting on their own seat belt or climbing to the top of a climbing frame in our local park. The second is more simple, and it is one that I used at the beginning of each school day. While others are urging children to ‘Be a good boy/girl for your teacher’, I’m telling them to ‘Try hard’, and based on what I’ve seen so far (I’ve been doing this for almost three years), it makes a real difference. This is because the child starts to see trying hard as being the key thing to do in school rather than simply being good, and let’s face it, every child is going to have their moments during the school day when they’re behaviour slips, so insisting that they should always ‘Be Good’ is just setting them up for certain failure. By contrast, ‘Trying hard’ is something they can achieve, even if they don’t necessarily succeed at what they are trying to do, and research has shown that the growth mindset that this attitude helps to instil in them has major long-term benefits for their psychology and for their development.

The development of good self-control skills can equally be re-enforced using modern mantras. For example, I usually couple the pre-school ‘Try hard’ with ‘Think before you do.’ This encourages a child to remember to think about the consequences of their actions before they do anything rather than simply giving in to their innate impulses, and this is crucial to the development of the ability to delay gratification.

Of course, no mantra, however well intended, will make sense to a child if you have not explained to them in advance what it means and why it is important. Thus, mantras are not life lessons in themselves. Instead, they are there to act as a reminder of what then child has learned from more detailed discussions about how best to approach life. This is why I refer to them as tools, rather than as life lessons. Yet, used correctly, they are still incredibly powerful.

So, how do you go about using mantras to help your child develop a growth mindset and other core life skills? Well, you start out by explaining what a particular life skill is, and why it is important. You can then give examples of this life skill in action. These examples can from your own life, from your child’s life or from stories they are familiar with (such as their favourite book, film or TV series). Once you have done this, you can introduce them to a modern mantra that will act as a short-cut to remind them of what this core life skill is, why it is important and how to implement it in their life. From that point on, every time you use that mantra with them or, even better, they use it for themselves, it will re-enforce the learning process and encourage them to incorporate that particular life lesson into their set of automatic responses to any obstacles they encounter in their lives. However, you may find that you still need to revisit the underlying life skill discussion from time to time, especially if it seems like they are starting to forget it.

Once a child is older, you can start encouraging them to develop their own mantras based on their own experiences and their own aims and goals in life. This has the potential to create a positive feedback loop where the child starts to learn their own lessons and encode them into mantras that they can then use whenever they encounter similar situations in the future. This will not only help them learn from their own experiences (and their mistakes), it will also help them build an ever-expanding psychological tool kit that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives and that will help protect them from all that the grown-up world has to throw at them.

So, what makes a good modern mantra? Well, they generally need to be short, obviously linked to a specific life lesson or core life skill, and it really helps if their either rhyme or has good alliteration. This makes them much easier to remember, and it makes them more believable. However, they also need to be framed in a positive rather than a negative point of view, and wherever possible, they need to avoid absolutes. This is because people, and children in particular, will slip up from time to time, and mantras phrased in absolute terms will make them feel like they have failed (and so encourage them to give up), rather than that they’ve simply made a mistake that they can learn from.  Finally, mantras need to focus on behaviours and attitudes rather than on personal characteristics and personality. This is because a child needs to feel that they are being encouraged work on something they know they can change, rather than being criticised for who they are inside.

To give an example of this, let’s explore possible wordings for mantras that are aimed at encouraging a child to think about the feelings of others before they act. We’ll start with a very basic one:

‘Don’t be unkind to your brother’: This will be the type of thing that many parents will say on a regular basis, but it focuses on the negative behaviour (being unkind) you wish to eradicate rather than the positive one you want to encourage. Paradoxically, by highlighting the negative behaviour, you are providing your child with feedback that just encourages them to display more of it, and not less. When using mantras, negative behaviours should be ignored, and only positive behaviours highlighted.

‘Always be kind to your sister’: This is phrase that seems very obvious, yet it contains an absolute (always) that no child is ever going to be able to live up to. This means it is just setting a child up for failure, and the feeling of constantly not being able to live up to a parent’s expectations that this ingrains within them can cause life-long psychological scars.

‘Good boys don’t hurt other people’s feelings’: Again, this sounds like a winner at first, but think about the exact wording. If the child this is said to does hurt someone else’s feelings, how are they going to interpret this? They are going to think that since good boys don’t do that, then they must not be good. This can be very psychologically damaging and lead to children feeling that they, deep inside, not good, and acting accordingly.

‘You should/must be kind to others’: This is another example that sounds good at first until you consider its implications. Since the child is being told this is something they must or should do, it encourages them to put the needs of other s over their own needs, and can leave them open to being exploited by other people. This is not a good route to happiness or success.

‘Try to be as kind as you can’: This is much closer to a good mantra. It has three key components. Firstly, it makes it very clear is what the child should strive to do (be  kind); Secondly, it emphasises that this might not always be possible (the ‘as you can’ bit); and finally, it highlights that the most important thing is to try to live up to the contents of the mantra (the ‘Try to’ at the beginning), rather than necessarily achieving it every time. It also has a nice bit of alliteration between the words ‘kind’ and ‘can’.

‘Be kind’: This is my own personal preference for a mantra of this type. It is simple, it is straight forward, and it is applicable to almost any situation. However, for it to be useful, you need to have explained to the child in advance what being kind means. In this context, it means thinking about the impact your behaviours have on other people and acting in a way that is consistent with your core beliefs, but that doesn’t, as afar as possible, negatively affect others. Of particular importance here is emphasising the fact that being kind does not necessarily always mean being nice, and that sometimes the kindest thing to do for someone is not always the nicest. For example, it may be nice to always do something for someone, but it is not the kindest if it prevents them from learning how to do it for themselves.

Once you have come up with a mantra that you are satisfied with, then you need to start using. This involves identifying the time and place where it is likely to be of most use and then making sure that you regularly use it in that context. I’ve mentioned already that I use the ‘Try hard’ and  ‘Think before you do’ mantras at the school gates at the start of the day, but these are only two parts of a three-part compound mantra (one that incorporates more than one life lesson or life skill). the whole mantra is ‘Try hard, be kind and think before you do’. These are the three things that I think if a child can achieve in a day at school (or indeed any day), it can be considered a success. Yet, implicit within the wording of this mantra (because of the ‘Try hard’ at the beginning) is the understanding that if the don’t achieve any of them, it’s not the end of the world, and they can always try again tomorrow.

So, hopefully this article has shown you not only the benefits of using mantras to help re-enforce the core life skills that are important for your child to develop, but also how you can create your own and incorporate them into the daily lives of you and your child.  Just remember, however, that mantras are powerful tools, and that a poorly worded mantra can do more damage than good, so make sure you think them through carefully before you start introducing them into your child’s life.