In last weeks edition of Celebration of Youth I spoke about how impactful our actions can be to children. It is important to continue with this subject as it seems that time is critical when confronting problems associated around youth. Just the other day as I was standing in the James Ronald Webster Park, the children were being let out of school. It was so interesting to find that as the older students passed, they were quite reluctant to speak to me our my tennis coaches.

This made me interested in doing a mental survey of the differences between older children and younger children in terms of their salutation habits. As the younger children walked by, I noticed that I did not even have to initiate a greeting as they would say ‘good afternoon’ to me first.
The younger children were quite pleasant in every way and actually inquisitive as to why we were there and what did they need to do to sign up for tennis classes. I had the feeling that it seems that children get ‘harder’ and ‘tougher’ as they get older. It dawned on me that this is obviously a defence mechanism of some sort. It is always easy to distinguish a confident young man or woman from ones who have a low self efficacy. Confident children always have their heads held high and they will not hesitate to speak to an adult and bid him or her a good morning, evening, or afternoon. I then remembered an important term that always came up in my education classes at university; ‘labelling.’ This term describes the act of putting someone or something in a category. In terms of education it can have two connotations. First, in the realm of special education, the term is used when diagnosing a child as having a learning disability such as ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder), or dyslexia. Secondly, and most important, labelling can be used negatively by parents, teachers, and adults by verbally or physically putting children down.
It is common knowledge that when one tells someone that he or she is a certain way, that person will eventually start believing it. If we tell our children that they will never amount to anything, or that they are bad, or ugly, or any other type of detrimental comment that can be destructive to their self image, we are condemning them. Being young is a very confusing time and it is important that all adults support children in every thing they do. Children should always be disciplined for undesirable actions, but at the same time, they should be lauded when they do something positive. Children do positive things on a daily basis and much more often than we think. Yet, it is disturbing that society places more emphasis on the one thing that goes wrong.
I will never forget the time that I was a teacher at a High School by day, and a janitor at the same school by night. That job taught me a great deal about life in general. Yet, one thing always stood out about that job. No matter how many trash cans I emptied a night (more than 100), I never received a comment about it unless I missed one. Although I had work diligently to clean, wash, and empty trash cans in many offices and classrooms so that children could be comfortable to learn, I only received negative comments when I made one mistake. Praise children for the positive things they do and do not label them unless you truly want them to grow up that way.

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