How to Raise Children Effectively? Continued

Last Friday we went to an India Restaurant at the Hong Mei Entertainment Street to celebrate for my second daughter Katharine receiving the school certificates. We are all very proud that she ended up with the second best student at her level. We are proud because she was not always liked that as her sister.

After she graded from primary school to high school (Gymnasium), she was pending between the score of 2 to 4 (with 1 the best and 6 the worst). My wife tried to help her to be better and educated her to be more disciplined. We knew that she is intelligent and talented in many ways. But my wife and she struggled for a long time. And one day I decided to try a new method that I learned from leadership training: making the change seems to be easy.

One day in a very casual atmosphere I spoke to Katherine: “Look. Would you try one thing for me? Try to improve only one point in only one subject, what ever subject you would like to chose, while remain the scores for all other subjects the same during the next semester.” It sounded for her to be easy to achieve, so she promised: “I will try.”

By the end of the semester, she improved one point not only in one subject, but in three subjects. We were very happy. We did not make more ambitions goal for her, but told her: “That is great achievement. For the next semester, would you try only to improve one point for only one subject you chose, based on your current performance.” She confidently said: “Yes. I will try.”

During all the semesters she continuously put more efforts. And the result today is really impressive with the average score of 1.3. In addition she has a great interest and talent in music and playing well guitar.

I believe that because of the pressure in the industries the management often set too high goals for people to fail, not to achieve. And while people fail, they develop a habit of failing and lose confidence in achieving. Since they can not meet the goals anyhow, why should they bother even to make any efforts?

What we can learn from Katharine is to make changes or improvements seem to be easy, so we can succeed and we have the ambition to overachieve, not because of the pressure coming from outside, but because of the inner drive to be the best we can be!

How to Raise Children Effectively?

On Friday 12, my first daughter Sophia finished the high school (Abitur) at the German School Shanghai. The whole family went there for the celebration. Sophia got the best scores at the school and received in addition three awards in Physics, in arrangements for different activities and for the competition of best foreign schools.

After the celebration some parents came to my wife and me and asked: “How do you raise your children?” This was a very good question. Honestly we never thought about it before. It is like to ask a slim person, how she keeps her body slim. Most likely she just does not know, because she was slim for the entire life. Sophia got always the best scores.

But when we reflected our experience with Sophia’s education, we may want to mention one thing that contributed most to her success. Sophia tried to do a lot of things in early years including writing creative texts, designing web sites, playing theatre, playing piano, participating technical camps and participating reading competitions.

During the course of years, she some times shifted the interests. What so ever jumped into her mind, we always encouraged her to do. When she was successful, we were happy with her. When she wanted to do something else we said that’s fine to try something new. For selection of university and subjects we never had any preoccupation and instead asked her to explore herself what she really likes.

So what did we really do in her development? Not much. We leave her in free run, encourage her to try new things and play some role models ourselves. And we are extremely happy with the results and the little time we have invested.