How Goal-Setting Can Stop the Battles With Your Kids Over Reports and Projects

If you are like most of us, you’ve been through the travails of supervising, shopping for, pushing and arguing, and finally doing much of our children’s projects. These experiences become much more manageable and even enjoyable when kids develop goal planning and achievement powers.

Thoughtful decision-making for setting and achieving goals is an essential skill indispensable throughout your child’s education, employment, health, and ultimately, quality of life. These goal-achievement powers are part of your children’s neural networks of executive functions, developing now in their prefrontal cortex. These are the brains’ control centers for goal-directed behavior, as well as attention focus, inhibitory control, delay of gratification, emotional self-management, interpersonal relationships, empathy, planning and prioritizing, critical analysis, judgment, reasoning, and flexible thinking and adaptability.

Children aren’t born with fully developed executive function skills, they are born with the potential to realize them. You can increase the development of many neural network skills by promoting environments and experiences that activate their brains’ networks for goal setting and achieving.

The Motivating Power of Choice

Children work harder and persevere through challenges when invested in personal goals they choose and plan to achieve. For example, in studies of reading comprehension, students all read the same book independently. One group was told to read with the goal of making personal connections with the story. In that group, brain scans revealed higher activation in the neural networks of executive function, and subsequently, they showed greater understanding and memory outcomes.

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Choice (initially with guidance for what is possible) builds children’s sense of ownership, along with their skills of judgment and decision-making. Having choice also helps children diminish negativity about their potentials and/or school success that they may have developed through failures or underachievement.

When starting on your plan to help your children be successful at accomplishing goals, guide them to set goals that they consider worthy and valuable.

Encourage them to tell you their goal and why they want to achieve it. Their motivation, personal gratification, and skills will follow. If they cannot think of a goal, you can encourage their selection of desirable goals with discussions, books, internet searches, etc., about things they have already revealed interest or new ones you think would captivate their interest.

As you work to build your children’s general goal skills, with their choice of the initial goal topic or project, you become a guide rather than a director. With your guidance, help them consider the possibilities and potential obstacles involved in achieving the goal. Encourage them to talk through the tasks involved in its planning. With your respect for their appropriate choices, self-confidence, and the positive relationship you will build in the goal acquisition process.

Optimize Early Attempts at Goal-Planning

Early goal skill-building experiences need to be short-term at first. With the right support and small steps planned to achieve the goal, they will extend their abilities. They will become more tolerant of delaying immediate gratification to achieve the intrinsic satisfaction of achieving goals.

Start by promoting their positive connections to their chosen goal. You know their interests and strengths and can emphasize the parts of the unit that you know will be particularly engaging for them. Consider inviting them to also consider and tell you what parts of the goal-progress plan they predict might be the more challenging.

Let your child know that you admire their desire to take action. Partner with them, if/when they desire, as they construct the structure for achieving their goals, but serve as a guide for their choices, not a director.

Ideas for Building Goal Reaching Challenges

• Encourage keeping track of times and strategies they used to resist immediate gratifications and persevere through setbacks.
• When they don’t meet their part-way goals, be warm and supportive. Rather than direct their actions, listen actively, without interrupting verbally or displaying agreement or disagreement.
• Invite them to consider why and what they want to do differently.
• Again, less input from you builds their perseverance and confidence. This does not mean avoiding connecting. You should connect as often as they are comfortable. Try to be an observer and supporter when they jump to ask for help or answers to questions before working these out themselves. Try to turn these questions back to them, progressively guiding them to solutions. When applicable, when an “answer” is arrived at, ask, “anything else?” to promote them to always consider alternative options.

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Sustaining Motivated Effort

Optimism: The brain is wired for heightened interest and attentive focus when it foresees the pleasure of goal achievement. Those experiences activate the brain’s memorable, deeply satisfying dopamine reward response.

If children's brains anticipate possible pleasure from achieving their goals, they will be more optimistic about the outcome and likely dedicate more effort to achieving them.

Vividly imagining the future: The critical element in motivating children to set long-term goals is their desire to do so. Neuroimaging research data suggested that when people had more reminders about their desired goal, including visualizing the future with the goal achieved, they had more brain activity in their memory and decision-making networks. These subjects also had a general increase in sustaining consistent patient effort toward their goals.

Progress awareness: Children’s awareness of their incremental progress toward the goal sustains the brains’ satisfaction response (dopamine). But they often need guidance to recognize their ongoing progress. Work with them to help them plan how they will monitor their progress points, such as charts, graphs, stacks of blocks, and graphs showing a progressive change.

In your children’s brains’ development, immediate pleasure has a powerful impact on their actions. Start building their abilities to sustain effort toward goals with ways they will recognize early and frequent positive outcomes. They can develop more skills of resisting immediate gratification for longer-term goals. Consider ways to celebrate goal progress, e.g., put their name on a post-it or index card they decorate and place it on their bulletin board that says, “I reached my goals for today….this week” or get them a plant to put in the ground or their room to celebrate their growing skills.

As your children ‘s goal achievement skills grow, they will have greater resistance to their brains’ default programming for getting immediate gratification. They will get more intrinsic satisfaction from reaching meaningful goals. You and they will notice more skills in their abilities to focus and persevere at required school tasks, such as reports and projects.

As they build self-confidence from their successes, they develop their abilities to set and achieve higher goals for themselves now and through life.