What can ancient cultures teach us about parenting?

How to motivate children

Intrinsic motivation is what makes a person dance in their living room at night when no one is watching. It makes Rosy immediately start colouring in the morning when she wakes up. And it makes Gelmy, the daughter of a woman I met in a small Mayan village on the Yucatán Peninsula, come in from playing with her friends to help her mother with the tortillas.

In many ways, intrinsic motivation is magical. It allows people to grow, learn, and work without (much) struggle or resistance. And it likely lasts longer than its counterpart, extrinsic motivation.

To motivate a child without bribes or threats, the child needs to feel:

Connected to you or another person close to the child.

Like they are making the choice to do the task and that no one is forcing them to do it.

Like they are competent and that their contribution will be valued.

Praise can undermine motivation and generate competition (and strife) between siblings.

Parents can learn quite a lot from a child. Knowledge can flow in both directions. Don’t assume your approach or vision is the best. When you pay attention to a child’s vision or ideas, you’ll likely find the child often has valuable and useful information.

Accepting a child’s knowledge, idea, or contribution is a potent way to motivate the child.

Have fun with hyacinth colours, much as you would mix tulip colours to have more impact in a pot, or gladioli spires in a vase. Tom suggests using blue tones together and combining the yellows with the whites. So for example, he mixed three different blues (‘Blue Star’, ‘Sky Jacket’ and ‘Aida’) in one pot; a pure white (‘Carnegie’) with yellow (‘City of Haarlem’) and loved both combinations. Make sure to check flowering times to avoid planting an early (such as ‘Delft Blue’) with a late (such as ‘Odysseus’). They won’t look good at the same time.

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Hyacinths in pots work especially well, even more so than in garden borders. This way, you can raise them on to a table inside, or place pots on a wall so you can enjoy them and see the colour variations in the flower – and of course the scent is closer to your nose.

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Tom recommends blues and purples for planting in the garden. In spring, as he says: “There’s an awful lot of yellow about – daffs, primroses, cowslips, corylopsis and so on, so blues and purples are ideal in contrast. That’s why hellebores are so welcome, as a break from yellow and why bluebells work so well a bit later in spring.”