The pocket to esteem, a gen-ni-a-la idea!
19 June, 2017
When my blogger partner Cynthia Larouche told me about the concept of pride tickets and self-esteem, I thought it was a great idea! (By the way, his entire blog post Self-esteem one step at a time is awesome!) Already, in my "over-stimulated" mom's head I saw the script at home. I was really looking forward to trying the experiment with my tribe! If there is one thing we want for our children, it is that they have enough self-esteem to go into life, to face new situations and to live successes. Of course, we spend our time celebrating their efforts, giving them congratulations and congratulations to make them aware of their strengths, which is a great thing since the children are fuelled by positive feedback.
But at Les Belles Combines, we like it when there is visual support and, for good reason, it turns out that visual media are very effective in our interventions with children! Indeed, as our cocos have not yet acquired the capacity for abstraction, generalization and therefore symbolization, visual support facilitates their understanding while serving as a reminder. As the saying goes: the words fly away and the writings stay!
So here it is! Lately, each of my children has created their own pocket with esteem thanks to the document created by Les Belles Combines (even mom and dad, we can never repeat it enough you have to serve as a model!). It was a fun creative exercise for the whole family! Over the past few weeks, we've taken advantage of all the situations of our daily lives to fill those little pockets with the pride notes we had printed and laminated at the local printer! When Louis came back from school with a nice comment from his teacher in his reading book, we gave him the pride note "I'm a reading ace" and said, "Here, put this in your esteem pocket!" The same goes for Laurier. When he explained that the great white shark is one of the only animals that does not have a predator, we took the opportunity to give him the pride note "you are a real naturalist". Even little Simone, 3 years old, has her little pocket to esteem! She was more than proud to get her pride note "I know how to help others" after accompanying her 2-year-old sister on the pot during her cleanliness learning phase.
And the tickets have accumulated over time, the pouch filling up and suddenly the personal esteem inflating. We even put the grandparents in on it. They too were allowed to give tickets to the children! Our little foams don't always work the same way when they're in the presence of other adults!
The magic worked the night that everyone together opened our clutches! This exercise allowed us to make a nice observation: each of us had several pride notes in his pocket of esteem but these differed from one person to another! So we realized that everyone had strengths that others didn't have! Which made us different but equal people.
We also sometimes look at the missing little notes in our pocket and give us the challenge of working on these little missing points of our personalities, since there is always room for improvement! This is how the children were able to see that we (their parents) are not perfect either and that we also do not have all the pride tickets in our little pocket of esteem...
Do you like the idea of the value-held clutch and pride tickets? Would you like to bring the experience to your pet? You can get them Right here, print and laminate them for more durability!