(P) Why is High Performance Learning the right choice for your children?
As parents, we naturally want the very best for our children. We witness the wonder of watching them grow, learning to crawl, then walk, and eventually talk, and we sense their incredible potential.
As parents, we naturally want the very best for our children. We witness the wonder of watching them grow, learning to crawl, then walk, and eventually talk, and we sense their incredible potential.
The question to be asked and answered is how do we unlock that potential? Unfortunately, there is no definitive guide to good parenting, no universally accepted manual we can refer to unequivocally to navigate our way through the many challenges and choices we face as parents during early childhood and adolescence. We effectively make it up as we go along, doing the best we can with the knowledge we have at the time, hoping in the end that we are making the right choices and that everything will work out okay in the end.
Building Capacity Early
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we make as parents is thinking that the most important schooling years are in high school, when our children are preparing for exams that will decide which university they are accepted into.
Whilst choosing a good school, with a proven track record of high exam results and university offers from top universities, is certainly important, secondary school is not where you build capacity. It is during primary school that the brain of a child is most permeable, undergoing hyperbolic growth and development, and it is in the primary school where the foundation for future success is formed.
By the time our children arrive at secondary school, their intellectual capacity will already be self-evident, with some children able to communicate in multiple languages, and with a reading speed two or three times that of other children. It is in the primary school years essentially, that you form the base of your pyramid of knowledge, and the wider and deeper your base, the greater the potential for future growth.
Developing a Growth Mind-set
In addition to starting early, Carol Dweck, a lecturer at Columbia University and Harvard University, and author of The New Psychology Of Success reveals that another key factor of success is not innate talent or intelligence, as many believe, but resilience, being the ability to persevere and grow through adversity.
Dweck provides compelling evidence to show that it is not generally the most talented athletes that make it to the Olympics. Talent itself is not enough. It is individuals prepared to do the workday in, day out, through the pouring rain, the biting cold, and soring temperatures, through injury and short-term disappointments, never giving up on their dream, who eventually go on to achieve success.
High Performance Learning
