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5 Ways to Prepare Your Child for Daily Success

Sponsored content from Impact Taekwondo

By Jim Evins, Program Director and Owner April 21, 2021

For over 8 years, Impact Taekwondo has been teaching life skills and martial arts to kids and their families. We have learned so much from teaching our students.

We all want our children to be successful. One question I often ask myself: Are they successful in spite of me or because of me? 

The best way to succeed is by doing the right things consistently — daily — and creating positive spaces to learn and fail. One of the most effective ways to do this is to focus on prompting instead of punishment.

Here are 5 tips to help you prompt your child toward good behavior and decisions:

1. Create Friendly Competition

One of the ways to prompt your child toward good behavior is to create a simple competition where you dare them to turn a negative behavior into a positive one. If your child is fidgety and doesn’t sit still or tends to be disruptive, create a friendly competition or prompt that steers them to better behavior.

For instance, have them sit still and pose a challenge: “Let’s see if you can sit stiller than me!” This puts their focus on trying to do better than you. They learn how to sit still without even realizing it.

2. Give Them a Dose of Praise

If your child wins the friendly little competition, or they do something well, give them a good dose of praise.

A few encouraging words such as, “Look at how good you are at this!” is positive reinforcement that makes them feel good about themselves and their accomplishments.

3. Set Your Child Up for Success.

The whole goal behind prompting is to catch your child doing good things. How often do you catch them doing something good rather than bad behavior? Every time you catch your child doing something good, let them know.

Along with praise, setting your child up for success means you recognize and reward their good behaviors. In fact, the more you catch them doing good things, the more their brain tells them “I like this!” which gives them a good reason to continue.

4. Brain Power

When children are punished for their behavior, their body releases cortisol, a stress hormone.

So, what kind of brain do you want your child to have? A brain that is excited about doing good things, or a brain that anticipates getting in trouble? I know my choice. I want my child to be constantly excited about doing good things.

5. Redirect

Helping your child improve their behaviors involves more than prompting them, setting them up for success, and catching them doing good things. Sometimes prompting involves redirection.

Redirection is simply redirecting their attention in a different direction when they are upset, worried, or anxious. Completely change the subject to something positive and engaging. Invite them to look out the window at something interesting, or ask about a favorite toy. This type of prompting helps divert their attention to a positive experience which supersedes their other difficult emotions.

Another question I ask myself is: "How well do I prompt my child — and my students — for successful interactions and behaviors?"

We can all agree, children will not have the very best discipline all the time. To improve their level of discipline, it is important that we prompt them all the time. Then, catch your child doing good things and set them up for success.


We are Impact Taekwondo, a family-owned and -operated Martial Arts School in Highlands Ranch. We are focused on building strong students to help create strong families and communities.

This summer, we are offering five awesome weeks of Camp Impact, including one week for our youngest students (ages 4-6). Our staff of Certified Instructors will work hard to make sure your child is having an awesome time. No martial arts experience is necessary!

Camp Details

  • Camp days for ages 5-12 are 9:00 AM–4:00 PM. Early drop off and late pick up available.
  • Dragon camp for ages 4-6 is 8:00 AM–12:00 PM.
  • $175 per week when you register by May 15 | $200 per week after May 15
  • 10% discount offered for siblings and multiple weeks.
  • 10% discount when you mention Macaroni Kid (cannot be combined with sibling or multi-week discount).

We invite you to check out all our programs and summer camps.


Impact Taekwondo
2201 Wildcat Reserve Pkwy #C9
Highlands Ranch, CO 80126
(303) 721-7800

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