At the beginning of this year, I asked our private Facebook group what emotional life skills they felt their strong-willed children needed.  So many of the parents said that patience is something their children struggle with. 

So today we get to talk to Mike Fitch, CMHC about practical ways to teach our children patience.  Mike knows what it takes to develop patience as he himself has ADHD, he has a child with high-functioning autism, and he coaches hundreds of clients a year.

 We are grateful for his willingness to teach us some of the tricks he has learned.

 

 

LISTEN ABOVE OR READ THE SUMMARY BELOW.  

 

Mike Fitch, CMHC

We all struggle with patience

When Celeste first asked me to talk about patience, I thought she meant parents having more patience.  Why would I think that?  Because we ALL struggle with patience.

I think knowing that helps us be more patient with our kid’s impatience.  Developing patience is a life-long process and one that we’re all working on.

Patience is a critical life skill to develop

 Even though we all struggle with patience, that isn’t an excuse to not try to develop the ability to be patient.  It is right that so many of the parents in the group wanted to help their children develop patience.

Patience is a skill that each of us need to use each and every day of our lives.  If we do not increase our ability to be patient, we could really struggle.

Why is it so important to know how to be patient?

If you’re kids aren’t patient they could really struggle at school, home, work, and socially.

Just ask yourself these questions to help you realize the importance of patience:

How are you personally struggling with patience?  

How is your impatience negatively effecting your life?

How could having more patience help you?

Here’s some other reasons patience is so important:

Patience really helps us handle delayed gratification. What if your child never learned how to wait for what they wanted? What struggles could they face if they had to have what they wanted right when they wanted it? What kind of emotional, financial, social trouble could they get into if they couldn’t handle delayed gratification?

Patience helps us learn better.  It takes patience to develop new skills and to perfect skills you already have.

Patience helps us be tolerant of others. As ALL parents know, it takes a lot of patience to interact with other humans. There will always be people in our lives that do things that irritate us.  Our patience allows us to function in the real world and deal with the people that might be frustrating for us to be around.

My Top Tips for Teaching Patience

Tip #1 Model Patience

I always hesitate saying this, but are your kids learning impatience from you?  Do you practice delayed gratification?  Do you show tolerance of other’s in your life?  Are you often losing your cool with friends, family, or co-workers?  Are you expecting your child to be perfectly patient when you yourself are really struggling to be patient?

If you feel like you’re genuinely really patient, awesome!  Keep up the good work!

If you feel like you have room for improvement, it’s never too late to start changing.

“Children are great imitators.  Give them something great to imitate.”

You can trust that if you are modeling patience well and teaching it often, that your children will eventually follow your example.

Tip #2 Use the Marshmallow Study to Increase Your Child’s Patience

Years ago, researchers wanted to study children’s ability to be patient and how it would effect them as they grew up.

These researchers started something called the “M...