Making Lemonade: Teaching Young Children to Think Optimistically

The benefits of an optimistic thinking style have slowly been seeping into early childhood teaching practice through research on resiliency, leadership, health, and what has been termed grit. Yet there remains a large vacuum in teacher education on both the importance and mechanics of teaching young children to become optimistic thinkers.

Explanatory style is how we explain events that happen to us- either optimistically or pessimistically. Children develop an explanatory style by age eight. However, the roots of this explanatory style appear during the preschool years, when children start seeing themselves as either successes or failures.

Making Lemonade is the first-to-market book on the topic of learned optimism in young children and provides practical, hands-on exercises and activities teachers and families can use to positively affect children’s explanatory styles and turn them into optimistic thinkers and learners. All activities have been field-tested in a diverse group of early childhood programs including Head Start and the military’s overseas program Sure Start.

The concept of learned optimism, while well established in research, is relatively unknown in teacher education and in classroom and family child care practice. It is a straightforward, easy-to-do approach that will equip children to be more successful learners and healthier individuals.