Teaching children to learn to listen to the spirit is an extremely important skill. And even more important is to act on what the spirit tells you to do. Son "Oatmeal" begged to learn to play the piano and I finally let him a year and a half ago. Every few months, he starts complaining that he hates the piano. What he doesn't like is the practicing! He complains and says he wants to quit. In this case, I usually just ask him to pray about it. Once he has prayed about it, he can decide if that's really what Heavenly Father wants him to do. Amazingly enough, every time, he has come back and says, "Ok, fine. I'm supposed to play the piano." And he starts practicing without complaint again. When my daughter Sugar complains, I tell her to do the same. But she says, "No! I don't wanna know the answer!" So until she gets the answer that she should quit, she's just gonna have to keep playing. I'm pretty sure she already knew the answer.
Sometimes we do have to use short term external motivators. Parents should prayerfully consider which ones and when to use them. In the book, Ender's Shadow (Ender, Book 5)
, the students are being trained in space battles. They have a big board that lists the top scoring students. However, the teachers noticed that the real leaders were not the ones that cared about the scores on the big board, or winning every battle, but the ones who cared about actually winning the war. Motivations can change; however we must be careful that the main motivation is not the short term reward.
My oldest son Chocolate Chip, wanted to learn to play the piano. He didn't like his piano teacher who tended to give him songs like "Love Songs After Dark" (he was 13 at the time!) He felt like he should quit, but he still wanted to learn the piano. So we made a deal that he would just practice daily the songs he wanted to learn and he wouldn't have to go to piano lessons. He still had a hard time practicing the piano, though. He would much rather play a computer game. We worked out a deal where he practiced his piano for at least 15 minutes and he could play an equal time on the computer. Soon he was practicing daily for 30 or 45 min without complaining. Then I cut the time in half - he’d have to practice 2x as much as the game time. Eventually, he got good enough that he decided he actually preferred playing piano to playing the computer. This helped him learn to put in the hard work of practicing so that his motivation changed.
W. Edward Deming studied management theory and wrote lots of books about improving manufacturing processes. A key point of his was to incentivize the process rather than the goal. If you incentivize the goal, then the process doesn't matter so much any more. A great example of incentivizing a goal is school grades. Students mostly don't care about learning the topic so much as they do learning what they must to get a good grade on the test.
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