Children learn positive thinking from parents

The power of positive thinking. Even children understand it and know its value. They may pick this up from their parents who exhibit and teach the power of positive thinking.

A new study by researchers at Jacksonville University and the University of California, Davis looked at 90 children, mostly white aged 5 to 10. They listened to stories which compared similar stories but one had a more positive spin, the other more pessimistic. They asked the children to judge the emotions and explain them. Then they asked the children and their parents to complete survey to measure individual levels of hope and optimism.

Children as young as 5 pointed out that the characters in the stories would feel better if they had positive thoughts. There was a significant understand of the emotional-feeling link as the children aged.

“The strongest predictor of children’s knowledge about the benefits of positive thinking – besides age – was not the child’s own level of hope and optimism, but their parents’” reports Christi Bamford, assistant professor psychology at Jacksonville University, who led the study when she was at the University of California, Davis.

Kids did have a hard time understanding how positive thinking would help characters who had experienced a negative event. A child’s level of hope and optimism influenced their understanding of events here, but again, it was the measure of the child’s parents’ feelings about optimism that was the true indicator of how children would respond.

“In short, parents should consider modeling how to look on the bright side,” concluded Bamford.

Source: MedicalNewsToday, Child Development