Flexibility, Persistence, and the Socially Intelligent Parent

Flexibility, Persistence, and the Socially Intelligent Parent

Anyone who tells you that there is one single way to parent children doesn’t know much about parents or children. Children are unique and so are their parents. It’s rare that any piece of parenting advice works well for everyone.

Nonetheless, there are general rules. The best parents follow two of them, which go hand in hand: Flexibility and Persistence.


The Two rules

Flexibility is the ability to change in response to your child’s needs. This is achieved through a willingness to experiment and a broad knowledge of different ways to handle the issues that come up during parenting.

If your child doesn’t respond to a suggestion, what will you try next?  If you want them to do their homework, how do you motivate them if they aren’t interested and don’t care about the consequences? If insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then flexibility is genius.

Persistence is a commitment to not give up if something you try doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean trying things that have failed, it means being will to try something new. Good parents do that until they find what works.  And when that stops working, they try something else.

Here comes Social Intelligence

Flexibility and persistence aren’t something we’re born with. They’re something we learn. We learn it by taking an interest in how people work and the many different things that motivate people. This is called Social Intelligence and it is literally the difference between good and bad parents. How do we get social intelligence?

  1. We learn to take other people’s perspective, to see the world through other people’s eyes. We learn about approaches to parenting that we’ve never thought about before or different ways of solving problems that might not be what our parents taught us or the first thing that comes to our mind.
  2. We can learn from other parents. There are lots of good books, articles, movies and documentaries written by or about good parents. Set yourself a goal of finding a few and studying them.
  3. Another approach is to explore alternatives ourselves that allow us to try out different things and learn the underlying psychology behind them. Mr. Adamis an interactive app that provides alternatives and also teaches you about psychology and the art of social intelligence.

Social Intelligence is what a good parent needs to understand what motivates people and especially their own children. And that’s exactly what Mr. Adamis about.



Our kids are all different and they all respond to different motivations. The best motivations are those that inspire our children to become the people they most want to be. That’s going to be different for every child and it will change as they grow. Finding out who that person is it’s one of the great joys of parenting.

The time you spend developing your flexibility and persistence, expanding your social intelligence by what motivates your child and the people around you, is an investment in your children that will continue to pay off for the rest of their lives, and their children’s lives, and so on.