From Parent Camp Newsletter 3-27-24
A mindset is subjective. It’s how we interpret or perceive what’s going on in the objective world. Everything is how our brain interprets it to be. The thing is, most of us don’t even realize we have mindsets about things. We think the way we view the world simply the way the world is – but that’s far from true.
Our belief systems (what we’ve decided to believe about the world and about ourselves), determine how we feel and react to people and how we experience situations, and even how our bodies respond physiologically.
Everything is filtered through our mindsets. We have an overall mindset (our worldview) but we also have lots of smaller mindsets. For example, we all have a stress mindset – everyone falls somewhere along a continuum. Some people feel stress enhances their performance (in sports, classes, work, etc.) and others feel it debilitates them.
Some have a positive mindset and others have a negative (glass half full versus glass half empty).🫗Some have a growth mindset and others have a fixed mindset. Of course, most of us usually fall somewhere in between the outer extremes of any of these mindsets.
An example of a very influential mindset is the placebo effect – it’s all about mindset. When people are told that may be getting a drug that makes them feel better – often they feel better despite having not received the actual drug. Our mind is so powerful that it can influence how we feel, physically. There are examples of people being led to believe things that actually changed their physical performance, and other skills, abilities, etc.
And our mindset as parents matters a great deal. What you tell yourself, matters. What you tell or infer to your kids, matters. How you respond to your kids, how you talk to them, discipline them, the expectations you have of them – all of it impacts them in every way. It literally shapes how they feel about themselves and how they perceive the world around them.
For example, studies show that your perception of your child’s academic competence can have more of an impact on their actual performance than the child’s own perception of their competence. That’s HUGE.
Another example: people raised in an authoritarian home usually become authoritarian parents (stricter, less flexible, less in tune with kids’ emotions, less concerned with their kids’ autonomy, etc.) and often even have higher developmental expectations of their kids. This has an enormously negative impact on the kids (who will likely go on to have similar negative parenting issues).
One of the most impactful parenting mindsets is simply having the understanding and the attitude that how you think, feel and behave has an enormous impact on how your child or teen thinks, feels, and behaves. When your teen is not thinking, feeling or behaving the way you’d like, you may be playing a significant role due to one or more of your own mindsets.
This can happen so easily because of the mental shortcuts our mind takes to make sense of the world in a much quicker and easier way (heuristics). Some of these mental short cuts cause us to believe that the negative things other people do – including our teens – is because of who they are as a person (some character flaw).
But we tend to excuse our own behavior as just a matter of circumstance (e.g., our stressful day caused us to explode at our teen who is too lazy to pick up their wet towel). Sound at all familiar? The problem is, you don’t even realize you’ve made this subconscious thinking error or have this cognitive bias.
There are somewhere around 175 of these common cognitive biases, many of which can impact your parenting directly. I review several in episode 30. Be sure to have a listen for an explanation of how this all works in your mind and the impact it can have on your parenting and on your teen.