Coach Ambereen shares a morning with her son to show how to help kids ask for help and build confidence. She coached him through writing homework by focusing on claims and supporting evidence instead of perfection, then celebrated when he worked independently.
Gracious day to you. I hope today you are a little bit kinder to yourself so you can be more gracious to everybody else around you. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Coach Ambrain. I am creating this series where I provide insights every single day. Take something that happened in the morning with my family and turn it into, I guess, revelation. Today was some. Some place I didn't really want to be, but I knew I had to be there. So my. My second is. Has always had a difficult time asking for help. He loves his support, but he doesn't know how to ask for it. So what we're working on is, how do you ask for help? And so in the morning, I knew he had an unfinished homework that he had to get done, and I knew I had to kind of push him to ask me to help. And I asked him the question, do you need me to help? He goes, I think I'll be okay. Great. Then if you're not going to ask me for help, I'm going to go for a jog. He goes, oh, maybe I might need your help. And I said, no, if you need my help, you have to ask for my help. I said it very directly to him, which isn't something that is ordinary of me. And I want you to focus a little less on my earrings. So I know the dangling and hanging around like they're, like they're holographic, but they're not. They're in my ear. So, coming back to topic, he said, okay, yeah, can you help me? But great. So I went to drop off. My eldest came back and he finished up his breakfast. We sat down and we started to kind of think about what he had to do. But right before that, what he didn't know is as I was walking back home from my eldest bus drop off, I had to mentally prepare myself because of the feedback that he had given me. I don't like the subject. I can't do well in writing about this. The day before or the night before, he spent like 4:45 minutes writing just four sentences, literally with guidance from my other kid. And what I realized is something had to shift and pivot. And I know with him, if I can give him the confidence and the boost that he needs to believe that he can do it, it'll actually start to get him to a place where he can. But for this one, it was a little bit more difficult because he said, I'm not even good at it. I'm really bad at this subject. I can't do it. So when we went downstairs and actually started doing this, you know, the. The unfinished homework, I really had to be like, man, you can easily do this, understand the same thing. You apply for ELA and ELU just. They change it up. It's like literally a story. Every single thing that's happening in history is a story. And it's different people connecting and all this stuff. And so I kind of planted that seed before I went, you know, went out. And once I came back in, I found myself in a very different energy. And to tell you honestly, we did one paragraph together where I kind of guided him on how to create a claim and how to support the evidence, on how to find things from the article that are kind of going back and overhauling theme. And as I was coming towards the end of that paragraph, I kind of stepped. Started to wean back a little bit more, but all right, put it into word. Don't overthink it. And he's a perfectionist, right? So I'm also working on him to say, done is better than perfection, progress is better than, you know, trying to make it just perfect. And just my conversation and the way that I intentionally coached him really shifted the paradigm of this whole scenario, because on any ordinary day, we would be sitting for an hour and a half, with me getting frustrated, losing my marbles at times, to have him be in a place where he didn't believe he can do it. And then we finished it. I said, great. The next paragraph, you're writing by yourself. He goes, oh, no, no. Said, I know you can do it. I believe you can do it. You just did it by yourself. So just say out loud what you're going to do, what you're going to write. This way, if it needs to be tweaked, I can kind of challenge you. And believe it or not, he did the third paragraph by himself. He was interjecting one of the, you know, one of the most important conclusions in the beginning. And I said, wouldn't that be a great end? And he goes, oh, yeah. And I said, what do you want people to take away? What message do you want them to get? And just kept pouring and thinking and writing. And I asked him, don't go back and read the article again and again. Think of what stuck from the article and really make that point that you want to communicate because they matter to you. So for those of you parents who are really struggling and thinking that you cannot do this, I'm telling you, you can do it. Change the energy, shift the mindset put more accountability on your kid and make them believe that they are possible. With that said, as ex mom, I am signing out and sending you a whole lot of goodness. Take care. Bye.
