Doesn't sound so appealing does it? We have come to praise the mediocre and the mediocre have come to expect it. I don't push my children to excellence through fear and criticism. I encourage them to achieve more than they thought they could through subtle encouragement. When one of my daughters brings me a drawing, I of course praise them for their efforts. I try to point out some details of their art that I found attractive, and then tell them that their practicing is paying off. They are getting better and better all the time.
How many people do you know put out minimal effort and expect maximum praise? I know quite a few who have succumbed to this thinking. What happened to striving? When has just simply acknowledging one's potential been considered enough? Why wouldn't we want to maximize it and see how far it can take us?
I see this every day with my children. I ask them to complete a chore around the house, and more often than not, I see the absolute minimum of effort exerted to complete it. I kid you not, sometimes their idea of cleaning the bathroom is putting down the toilet seat, closing the shower curtain, and pushing all the dirty clothes behind the door. They are completely blind to the empty toilet paper roll on the holder, the dried toothpaste in the sink, and the collage of hand prints on the mirror. Never mind the fact that the wastebasket has warped into a cascading heap of dental floss, tissues, and whatever else has been thrown in the general direction.
I will continue to show my children the correct way to clean a bathroom in hopes that someday they will actually 'see' what a clean bathroom looks like. I will continue to have hope that their clutter blindness will miraculously be healed around the time they move out. At this point, they know that I will not invite people over to our house so long as they don't see the value in effort.
Most of the time I get off track here in my rants about life and the kids that make it crazy, but I think that it does somehow relate. I don't sugarcoat what I have in my house. I don't sugarcoat the state of my car, and I certainly don't sugarcoat the level of insanity that I have reached in my attempts to encourage my children to be better than mediocre. If I have to completely lose my mind for them to want to be better than average, then I will die a certifiable loon. I'm okay with that. I would rather trade my sanity so my children will reach their potential, than sit casually back and praise their indifference. There's too much of that surrounding them, and I refuse to let them believe that this should be the norm.
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