Practice Hope
Encourage, Educate, Equip
Practice
prac·tice
Verb – perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency.
Have you ever caught yourself telling your child that practice makes perfect? I have been guilty of this a time or two. Recently, I was running a parent teacher conference; the child’s parent mentioned the phrase “practice makes better”. It started a chain of thoughts running through my head for days.
I realized that as parents, we take our children to multiple practices weekly and some of you multiple practices daily. Parents ensure their child practices baseball, soccer, football, dance, and even academic work like spelling words or multiplication facts. Growing up is full of practice. Sometimes, we require our child to continue practicing even if he or she would like to quit. Because our parents taught us never to be a quitter, right?
Conversely, as we become adults, the idea of practice seems to drift from our minds. We have jobs to do, money to make, and if we have not learned a skill by now, then we assume that we never will. I think we need to grasp on to the “practice makes better” concept and live out what we preach.
Parenting is hard. We are not guaranteed our child will mind, listen when we speak, stay out of trouble, be an A+ student, or be able to grow into an independent adult. Parenting also includes the ability to repeatedly interact and improve our child’s life. Their childhood is a gift of time. It is a set parameter of years that we need to use as our practice.
When our daughter, Piper, first started therapy at the Foundation for Blind Children, we were told to be patient. They explained that due to her lack of vision and poor muscle tone, it could take her 1,000 to 10,000 times to learn a skill that typical kids could learn in about 20 practices. Her response times were delayed severely. I would ask her to pick up a toy from my hand, and when she did not respond, it became frustrating. It was easy to pull my hand away, a minute after asking her to pick it up, and assume she did not want the toy. However, being patient revealed that it took her about 2 minutes to process the command, tell her hand to move where it needed to, and keep her body from falling over. If I had not continued this practice, she would have given up and assumed she would fail.
As parents, we need to practice daily. We need to practice patience, practice listening to our child, practice having hope in their future. Please do not pull your hand or heart away when your child does not respond. It may take your child multiple practices to become the better that they can be in this life. None of us are perfect, but those that practice compassion, empathy, and hope seem to have a better ability to handle life.
Keep practicing!
Practice Hope 
Great explanation, could see the visual through your words!!! Agree “Practice does make Success!”
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So beautifully said! We all need to practice patience!!
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Thank you!
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