Been thinking a bit about motivation of late. Talk of star charts and extrinsic rewards, personal hopes for intrinsic rewards, wonder on how exactly to motivate children towards learning what I think they should know but more to the point them doing it because they want to as opposed to me making them / suggesting it / having to coerce them into doing so even though I know it is for their own best interests and they will probably enjoy doing so and get something out of it intrinsic if they could only make a start at it.
So what does motivate my children then? Praise definitely, both actual, anticipated and withdrawal of / seeing another getting praise while they are not; the promise of something or bribery – if you do x you will get y – this is probably more effectual in stopping negative behaviour than in acting as a catalyst for good behaviour but it works; being able to manage something independantly is a big deal for both of them actually – Tarly’s latest thing is climbing into the car and then into her carseat by herself, Davies is daily doing stuff a bit trickier than the day before and succeeding ‘all by myself’. What I don’t really see in either of them is a passion for any one thing though – they are both fairly butterfly like if left to their own devices. This morning they have done colouring, Davies has played with his k’nex, looked through some red nose readers books by himself and then brought me a couple to read with him, sat and listened to George and the Dragon but got bored with Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, gone back to the k’nex, watched some random Nick Jr (but I turned the tv off last time they both left the room and no one has noticed yet 🙂 ), done some hamabeading – he made a car, counted past 40 for the first time ever (with very little prompting and finally grasping the pattern of 20 + 1 being 21, then 22 and so on and then repeating through 30s and 40s. Hurrah 🙂 ) and alternately played with and annoyed his sister.
Scarlett has done some colouring, pulled various books out of the bookcase and ‘read’ them to herself, almost used the potty 😉 , started a hama bead teddy, played with the k’nex when D wasn’t looking and alternately played with and annoyed her brother.
I have alongside this been pondering what motivates me. And am a bit horrified to learn that I am no longer sure 🙁 I don’t care much about praise or recognition, I tend to value my own self opinion over what other’s think of me – someone could be easily impressed by something which I have created with very little effort or care so that praise – although nice, would not really be warranted or valued much. Similarly there are things I would work really hard on but could be considered at best mediocre by someone else – I know what comes easily and hard to me and congratulate myself accordingly 🙂 I used to be quite motivated by money and status – I was very keen to know that I was earning more, had a better job title, was getting there faster and younger than everyone else whilst working in retail – I was pretty good at what I did and achieved most of those young Nic goals – sadly finding them pretty empty once done so – the thrill seemed to be more in the attaining than in the actual getting there. Since children however, and by getting my fingers very burned in my last big career type employment (which funnily enough coincided with the month before I fell pregnant) I have no great longing for that sort of success any more – mainly because I know what compromises in the rest of life it would entail. Status means pretty much nothing anymore to me – I see how people with great careers have very little else in their life and don’t want that for myself. Money would be lovely but I am no less happy for the lack of it – whilst it would be great to earn loads for doing something I enjoy and am passionate about I think a lottery win would be just as much fun to spend 🙂 So I would have to deduce that what really motivates me is succeeding at something which has been challenging. In the immortal words of that old geezer from the A team ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. So I need to work out what my plan is and set about achieving it so there is a challenge in there for me as well as the children.
I never want to lose sight of the fact that this is MY life and MY journey. Whilst the whole HE thing is what I consider to be best for my kids I do not want it to be a case of me surrendering myself to it / them. Whilst I don’t think that being a mother, particularly a HEing one is not worthy of a lifes work or that it should be undervalued or written off I also don’t feel that when the time comes to look back over my life I will have achieved all I could if I don’t at least strive to make my mark in someway other than as ‘Mummy’. At the moment I am feeling like I have about a hundred tasks all awaiting my attention with none of them getting enough of it to be done properly.
Had a long chat on the phone with my friend in NZ over the weekend – the first time we have really talked about HE although it had been mentioned a few times before. We talked a bit about approaches, how children learn and what I percieve to be the failings of the education ‘system’. Following on from that I have had a couple of examples of things recently which were completely new to me – clearly I was never taught them in school or was away that day or something. One was venn diagrams which I had read about on a couple of blogs so looked into further (and then asked a few other adults about whether they knew what they were and none of them did) and the other was fibonacci numbers. Now clearly having gotten this far through life ignorant of such things has not done me any great harm but it does make me realise how selective our education is and how subjective our level of knowledge can be. There are certain topics which have inspired me on which I know a fair bit, others which for whatever reason I have deemed uninteresting, have never come across or been introduced to I know little or nothing about. What if one of these gaping holes was the area I was destined to make a difference in? How can we know what will inspire us unless we scrape the surface of it by some sort of coincidence? Not sure what to do with this aside from not get freaked out by it to the point of grasshoppering from topic to another every ten minutes with the children, covering quantum physics and the pop career of Shakin Stevens in the same breath 🙂 Maybe butterfly is good!
Anyway, enough of this putting off what I really should be doing by blogging about why I might be putting it off instead of doing it 😉