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Hi this is Patrick with Kidscandoanything.com and I want to welcome you to the third in our ongoing series of short video articles that we’ve put together to give you some short tips and tools as to how to instill emotional intelligence into your children.

Well, today’s article is all about the life-long benefits that your children receive from instilling in them the trait of optimism and into yourself, especially now during the economic climate that our country is in.   There is a lot of things in the media, a lot of reasons to look at things pessimistically in terms of our economic future or your family’s economic future, well your children pick up on that very, very quickly and they start to develop beliefs.

Last week’s video article was all about how and when we develop our beliefs and the effects that that can have.  Well, our children are in the midst of developing those beliefs and by surrounding by such pessimistic things, it’s very likely they will pick up on a very pessimistic outlook on their own future.

So it’s critically important to help your children develop the trait of optimism.  Dr. Martin Sullivan from the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying the traits of optimism and pessimism for years has determined that optimism and pessimism are learned traits, so it is absolutely possible to change a pessimistic outlook into an optimistic outlook and having faith and hope in your future and of course, your children will do the same.

In fact, Dr. Sullivan also talks about the fact that the trait of optimism is a buffer against anxiety and depression and now, pessimism is clinically linked to anxiety and depression, so by developing optimism, you develop a buffer for your children.  The interesting thing too is that these traits are the most heritable that we pass on to our kids without even knowing it.  For example, when we talk to our spouse, how we explain our bad day really can be looked at either in an optimistic way or a pessimistic way.

Optimistic people look at bad things that happen in a temporary way that this is something that doesn’t usually happen to them, it’s a fluke that this bad thing happened.  They also look at it in a way that won’t affect any other aspect of their life that it’s specific to that situation and they also look at it in an impersonal way and that somebody else probably had something to do with it.

Whereas a pessimist would look at a bad thing happening and explain a bad thing happening as permanence.  This bad thing always happens to me, that it affects all other aspects of their life.  They’re just no good at anything and that this bad thing had everything to do with who they are.  They made it happen.

So again, because the benefits of developing optimism are so great, optimists have been proven in research to be more successful in school and in work and in athletics that they have improved health and they live longer.  They have longer and more meaningful relationships, and of course they have a much less likelihood of developing clinical depression.

So, again, it’s very, very important to look at how you explain things that happen in your life and help your children develop an optimistic way of looking at things that happen in their life because the three big reasons of the ways that we develop optimism in our children is number one is parental affection and showing some affection to your children, giving them that sense of security makes them feel that the world is a good place.  The second is allowing them to experience mistakes and failures and to experience different challenges.  The third is modeling and how we explain things that happen in our life and how we give feedback to our children about things that happen in theirs.  So doing so in an optimistic way, we’ll start to instill that in your kids.

Thanks again for watching number three of our ongoing series and next week’s video will be all about the power of written goal setting and the actual science behind goal setting.

Again, this is Patrick McMillan and thanks again for watching.  Don’t forget to check out my character education materials on the rest of the site.