26 F
Naperville
Wednesday, February 12, 2025

KidsMatter 2 Us – Empowering kids with a Positive Identity

-

One of the most important tasks of childhood and adolescence is developing a sense of self. Through external experiences, and the resulting internal emotions and understanding, children create a positive identity as someone empowered with purpose and the ability to affect change in their own lives, or conversely, as someone who is at the mercy of their environment.

Search Institute, a research organization that promotes positive youth development, has created a proven framework of 40 internal and external developmental assets that when present during childhood help youth grow to be healthy, caring, and responsible adults. As KidsMatter was founded, Edward Hospital and a team of community leaders identified the Search Institute framework as a complementary approach that focuses on the healthy development of all young people, and the framework became an infrastructure to help KidsMatter ensure the core building blocks of healthy development were in place for our youth.

One significant internal asset, Positive Identity, is defined as having Personal Power, Self Esteem, a Sense of Purpose, and a Positive View of the Future. Sometimes termed self-efficacy, this core sense of self is the foundation of resiliency and persistence in the face of adversity.

Educational psychologist Amanda van der Vyver gives suggestions for parents and educators on how they can foster this quality in children in a Community Keepers podcast entitled Self-Efficacy: A Story About “I Can” (www.communitykeepers.org/empowering-children-with-resilience-and-self-efficacy/). She suggests:

  1. Know your child’s strengths and name them specifically when offering praise or discussing adversity. Make sure they know the strengths they can draw on when facing a problem.
  2. Don’t protect children from failure. Rather, acknowledge failure when it occurs, but frame it by what the child can control and what they have learned for next time.
  3. Set realistic, short-term goals when trying to learn something or change a behavior.
  4. Encourage and praise effort and progress, rather than accomplishment.
  5. Model self-efficacy. Demonstrate awareness of the strategies used to solve problems, your own strengths and challenges, and the power to make positive choices.

For more information on developmental assets and promoting positive mental health in children, visit www.kidsmatter2us.org.

- Advertisement -
Nina Menis
Nina Menis
Nina M. Menis serves as CEO & Executive Director of KidsMatter. Nina grew up in Naperville and enjoyed raising a family in Naperville. Nina has worked in advancement for both public and private P-20 educational institutions and area nonprofits for more than 30 years. Contact Nina (pronounced nine-eh) at nina@kidsmatter2us.org or (630) 864-3974.
spot_img

LATEST NEWS