ABSTRACT
Motivation is tied to how children think. Specifically, it’s tied to what they say to themselves about their success and failure experiences. How children interpret events is called their explanatory style and contributes to their sense of helplessness or empowerment. A hallmark of children who persevere through challenging circumstances is a positive explanatory style or optimism. Explanatory styles are categorized as optimistic or pessimistic and reader's child’s style falls somewhere on the continuum from one to the other. Pessimistic children tend to be less resilient, more depressed, and achieve less in their lifetimes than optimistic children. Therefore, for children to realize their highest potential requires shaping and maintaining an optimistic style of interpreting success and failure experiences. Pessimists blame themselves when things go badly and fail to take enough credit when things go well.
