If you’re a parent, nothing makes you happier than seeing your child happy. The spark in their eye when they complete a LEGO® build, their laugh when they crack a joke or their smile as they proudly hand you their latest artistic masterpiece fill you with joy.

Your child has the tools to be the next ground-breaking architect, hilarious comedian or famous artist. Strength-based parenting involves learning how to spot your child’s strengths and ways to play to them, paving the road for their future success while having fun along the way.

What Are Some Types of Strengths in Kids?

For kids, the world is their playground. From playing games with the neighborhood children to the way they communicate and solve their problems, your little one channels their strengths to navigate through life. Although they aren’t curing cancer or solving life’s unanswered questions — at least, not yet, — they’re developing the soft skills to get there.

Some strengths your child may already have are:

  1. Cognitive: A child who expresses this strength is naturally curious about the world, approaching situations with empathy and thoughtfulness. When faced with new experiences, they demonstrate resiliency and aren’t prone to shy away from failure.
  2. Social: Have you ever watched your child interact with their friends? If you notice them comforting upset peers, respecting personal space and listening attentively to others, you’re seeing them practicing strong social skills.
  3. Language: Listen carefully to the way your young one tells a story or communicates a problem. Can you follow their thought process? Are they using strong vocabulary to convey their message? Do they use non-verbal cues, like hand movements or facial expressions? If so, they’re a skilled communicator.
  4. Literacy: Children with strong literacy skills express their strengths through reading and writing, using these outlets to express their vivid imaginations and most memorable moments.
  5. Math and logic: If your child continually impresses you with their ability to disassemble and reassemble projects, sort and organize objects in their environment or solve puzzles quickly, they’re exhibiting strong math and logic strengths.
  6. Creative: Is your fridge running out of space to hang your kid’s drawings? Does music rule their world? Do they spontaneously break out in song? Then their creativity is bursting at the seams, a strength with countless opportunities and outlets to pursue.

You may come to the exciting and rewarding realization that your child excels in more than one strength. Or, if you have multiple children, that each one has a distinct personality and skill set. Learn how to maximize your child’s potential by fully understanding where their strengths lie.

Child Strengths Checklist: Find Your Child’s Strengths and Interests

Recognizing your child’s strengths may be easy or require closer attention. One of the most beneficial tips for discovering and developing your child’s strengths is to make a checklist of each one, listing their relative traits and checking each trait or interest your child demonstrates throughout the following two weeks.

Use this checklist when looking for ways to identify your child’s strengths

Cognitive

Your child’s strength could be cognitive if they display these behaviors:

  • Demonstrates curiosity
  • Learns from their mistakes
  • Works hard at their tasks
  • Has a sense of personal strengths and weaknesses
  • Handles stressful events with grace
  • Offers to help where they can
  • Enjoys working independently
  • Is a self-starter
  • Sets goals
  • Has a growth mindset
  • Uses past experiences to solve current problems
  • Follows rules and routines

Social and Communication

These behaviors can indicate that your child’s strengths are sociability and communication:

  • Practices active listening skills and doesn’t interrupt too much
  • Makes an effort to meet new friends
  • Tells the truth
  • Enjoys helping others
  • Is sensitive to other’s needs
  • Knows how and when to resist peer pressure
  • Speaks openly and positively
  • Asks for help

Language

If your child exhibits these behaviors, their strength could be language:

  • Tells complete stories with a beginning, middle and end
  • Enjoys learning new words
  • Understands sarcasm
  • Uses non-verbal cues
  • Changes their tone of voice, for example, when asking a question
  • Uses words to express ideas, feelings, needs and wants
  • Enjoys listening to stories
  • Engages in open discussion at home, school and with peers

Literacy

Your child’s strength might be literacy if they demonstrate these behaviors:

  • Enjoys reading and being read to
  • Makes connections between reading material and personal experiences
  • Sounds out unfamiliar words
  • Recognizes sight words
  • Retells stories after reading them
  • Predicts what will happen next in stories
  • Uses expression while reading
  • Understands how to follow written directions
  • Knows how to rhyme and recognizes other sentence structures

Math and Logic

These behaviors could signal that your child’s strengths are math and logic:

  • Recognizes and understands patterns
  • Enjoys puzzles and word problems
  • Takes things apart and reconstructs them
  • Can do mental math
  • Remembers math facts, for example, simple addition
  • Compares groups and knows which is larger and smaller
  • Plays strategy games, like chess and checkers

Creative

If your child shows these behaviors, their strength could be their creativity:

  • Enjoys drawing and coloring
  • Brainstorms projects and unique ideas
  • Shows an interest in musical instruments
  • Makes their own music
  • Sings
  • Enjoys playing sports

Once you develop a sense of what your child’s strengths are, it’s time to find ways to encourage them to identify and grow their strengths independently.

How to Be a Strength-Based Parent

As a human being, you’re wired to see what needs fixing and overlook what’s already working. Why spend time tinkering with something that’s working properly when you could focus on rectifying something else?

Strength-based parenting breaks this pattern of thought and entails building up your child’s strengths before working on what they can improve. If you focus on fixing what they do wrong, you’re overshadowing everything that they’re doing right. Build up what they do right and make that their defining characteristic. Like anything new, breaking this pattern takes some getting used to.

As an example, if your child spends hours playing video games in front of the television, your first reaction might be making them turn off the game and practice a different hobby.

This natural reaction makes sense. You want them to play outside with their friends or read the book you bought them. But, the harder you fight for them to practice their strengths through other outlets, the less they’ll want to.

To avoid this reverse effect, consider taking a strength-based parenting approach. Instead of disapproving of their video gaming, point out the strengths and skills they’re practicing. Note their critical thinking skills when they decide how to beat a level, their interpersonal skills when they console an opposing member who lost or their communication skills when they work with a teammate.

When you focus on your child’s strengths, they have an easier time recognizing these strengths themselves while practicing other tasks. Instead of bashing one activity, encourage them to expand their strength-building hobbies — a parenting win!

Help Your Child Identify Their Strengths

Keep your checklist close by for the next two weeks, taking note of your child’s strengths. Or, if you prefer, at the end of the day, write three strengths you observed your kid use. By acknowledging their strengths, you help your child acknowledge them, too.

Some ways to help your child discover and develop their strengths include:

  • Writing them a letter: You can’t physically show your kid their strengths, but you can write out your observations for them to read. Take the time to sit down and write a heartfelt letter listing all of their positive qualities and strengths. Aid them in taking a step back and recognizing their achievements, training their minds to make these reflections independently as they get older.
  • Making a strengths chain: Especially helpful for younger children, making a strength chain is a fun, hands-on activity that promotes self-reflection and a growth mindset. Before sitting down with your little one, cut about 10 or 15 colorful strips of paper, about two to three fingertips wide. Then, with their help, brainstorm their strengths and list one per paper strip. After you’re done brainstorming, start your chain by taping or gluing the ends together to make a ring, making sure their strength is visible. Using another strip of paper and looping one end through the first ring, connect the second strip’s ends to begin your chain. Continue this step until your strengths chain is complete.
  • Starting an accomplishment box: Allow your child to pick a sentimental box to keep their accomplishments in. This includes your letters, their strengths chains, awards, successful report cards, artwork, stories or anything else that acts as a reminder of their strengths

By doing these activities, you’ll see your child’s confidence shine, and they’ll become increasingly passionate about practicing their strengths for future accomplishments.

Supporting Your Child’s Strengths

After defining your child’s strengths, keep them motivated by supporting their growth. Consider this list of strengths and their respective support strategies when brainstorming ways to encourage your kid’s growth:

  • Cognitive: This strength is usually self-motivated, but you can enhance this strength by being a role model. Vocalize your thought process and share your learning experiences. Lead by example by helping others in need or taking the time to set goals together.
  • Social and communication: Establish a line of open, honest communication. Practice good listening skills and provide help when they ask, even if a seemingly small problem. Encourage them to do the same with others, like befriending the new person at school or starting a study group.
  • Language: Give your creative child an outlet for them to practice their language skills. Sign them up for interpersonal activities like acting or debate. Listen to and welcome their outlandish stories and encourage open family discussions.
  • Literacy: Take your little one to the library to explore the endless world of storybooks, novels, comic books, magazines and other imaginative material. Build up their confidence to write their own novel, or challenge them with writing prompts.
  • Math and logic: Influenced by hands-on learning, consider investing in strategy-based games, like chess or checkers. Or, try estimating games, like how many candies are in the candy jar. Make the daily routine of cooking a math game by letting your child measure the ingredients or cutting a recipe in half.
  • Creative: Give your creative child a platform for them to express themselves. If they’re a musician, let them explore the different types of instruments. If they love art, expand their world with different media, like watercolors or scrap paper collages. Communicate with your kid and listen to their creative needs.

Encourage strength-building not only through at-home experiences but through school and after-school activities, too.

Sign Your Child up for a Learning-Based Program

Children learn by doing, and what do they love doing? Playing. Encourage your child to join a club or learning-based program to translate their strengths to the real-world. Depending on their strength, you may consider:

  • Outdoor activities: Sign your little one up for sports classes or wilderness adventure groups. Allow them to learn how to work in groups and follow instructions, engaging their mind in explorative and gross-motor play.
  • Music lessons: Rely on the professionals to teach your child how to read music, play an instrument and learn how to take one-on-one instruction and constructive criticism.
  • Debate teams: If your kid has strong communication skills and loves to share information, find a school-organized or kid-centered community group where they can thrive.
  • Theater: Your child’s stories should be heard outside of the home. Allow them to develop stories with like-minded individuals, making their imagination a reality through theater.
  • Art classes: Art classes for kids aid in the development of fine motor skills, teach the geometry of shapes and boost self-esteem through self-expression.
  • LEGO® Bricks: Widely recognized as a child’s favorite toy, LEGO® Bricks is a learning tool and creative outlet for children of all ages, teaching skills like math, architecture, engineering and physics in an easily comprehensible way.

Most learning-based programs are zero-obligation, so if your child tries one and ends up not liking it, try another until you find one they do like. The options for fun, hands-on learning are endless.

Benefits for Your Child and Later in Life

Think of when you were their age. What activities did you like doing? Did you have any hobbies? It might not be apparent, but your childhood activities shaped you into the adult you are now.

You don’t know what your child will be in the future, but you can help shape who they will be. By practicing strength-based parenting, you’re promoting benefits like:

  • Helping your child reach their full potential: When you focus on strengths, there is no ceiling. Learn to maximize strengths instead of minimizing weaknesses and pave the path to their personal best.
  • Supporting their mental health: Depression and other mental illnesses are becoming increasingly common in today’s youth. Support your child’s mental health by giving them the proper tools now, like positive mental health practices and high self-esteem.
  • Improving strengths and skills faster: Improving strengths is a much more rewarding and easier process than dismantling weaknesses. When you focus on strengths, your child will want to keep growing, improving skills at a greater rate compared to doing the opposite.
  • Encouraging a healthy parent-child relationship: By focusing on your child’s strengths, you’ll notice the good intentions in what they do. They’ll learn to trust you and rely on you for support. When tensions arise, you can depend on that communication system to help you handle the conflict.

Discover and Develop Your Child’s Strengths at Bricks 4 Kidz

Dedicated mother Michelle learned first-hand of the power of strength-building through her son’s favorite toy — LEGO® Bricks. Now, children across the globe benefit from the hands-on learning programs and events at Bricks 4 Kidz, centered around the fun of play.

Bricks 4 Kidz encourages STEM Learning with LEGO® Bricks. Your child engages in science, technology, engineering and math learning with our programs, putting their strengths into real-world practice while having fun.

Our learning-based programs include:

  • Virtual classrooms: We understand that life happens. For days when you can’t bring your child to the classroom, we can bring the learning to them! Our Virtual Classroom allows your little one to engage in our unique Bricks 4 Kidz virtual models to work through their project kit, suitable for ages 7 and up.
  • Preschool classes: Make learning fun and appealing for your preschooler. Our LEGO® kids workshop models promote learning patterns, colors, shapes and even age-appropriate STEM subjects, like ordering and math principles, that help little ones sharpen their academic strengths for later in life.
  • Robotics: Using the cutting edge technology of LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 and WeDo Jr. Robotics, kids work together to brainstorm solutions and think outside of the box to bring projects to life, all under the watchful eye of fully trained LEGO® educators.
  • Video game design: If your child loves video games, take them behind the scenes to learn the world of coding to design one of their own! We’ll teach them essential computer skills and slowly advance to more technical concepts, helping them master the digital world.

Jumpstart your child’s strength building and STEM learning by reaching out to a Bricks 4 Kidz franchise near you. Contact us to request a class or find a location today!

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