Looking at gym classes in school, researchers found that they could build intrinsic motivation in kids to participate in sports by focusing on mastery and performance.
Mastery allows us to find joy in the process of becoming expert with a new skill – helping us to build our performance and our ability to do something.
Find out how this research helps our children build intrinsic motivation in today’s tip with Dr. Jen!
In an after-school program, researchers looked at two different groups of kids: 1) Kids who joined the program because they wanted to, and 2) the group that joined the after-school program because others encouraged them to.
They found that students whose behaviour was self-directed and had joined because they wanted to saw more pro-social behavior as well as an increase in autonomy and self-efficacy.
A life lived without enthusiasm is a life half lived.
What gets your child out of bed in the morning? What makes their face light up? What makes them feel alive and connected? These are critical parts of their well-being. Follow your child’s intrinsic motivation and enthusiasm as a trail to their happiest future selves.
To build your child’s intrinsic motivation this week, have a conversation with them! Talk to them about how our brains are like a muscle.
If we go to the gym to get bigger biceps, but never lift weight that makes us uncomfortable, it’s unlikely that we will build any muscle tissue by doing that activity.
It’s when we start to feel some discomfort that we know the activity has done enough stress to our muscles that it will result in strengthening.
We can build our brains very much the same way! Learn more in today’s video tip with Dr. Jen.
To help your child build intrinsic motivation, notice what interests them and help them to engage in those things.
It’s rare that a child will be passionate about something until they’ve worked through the process of mastering that task. Do not worry about identifying things that inspire a big passion in your child.
Instead, keep an eye out for sparks of interest to determine if it’s something that your child might want to work towards mastering. Listen in with Dr. Jen to learn more!
To improve your child’s intrinsic motivation, help them set learning / mastery goals.
These goals place more emphasis on progress along the way and allow children to have lots of small wins on the way to their bigger goals.
This helps to keep them intrinsically engaged instead of placing all the emphasis on the end result. Think IMPROVE vs. PROVE. We don’t get to jump from step one to 100. We must make small improvements along the way to get to our goals. Often the big performance goal is overwhelming on its own. If we can find joy and engagement in each step, we are practicing our intrinsic motivation.