Initiative, Independence, & Responsibility

Amy Anderson at Let's Explore has a good article about fostering these skills in preschool childen. Her advice, in part is to:

Encourage your child to complete self-help tasks, such as cleaning up spilled juice or sweeping up paper from a cutting project.

Break complicated tasks into small steps and celebrate all the little successes along the way.

Praise the effort, not the task: “You didn’t give up and kept trying until you opened the toothpaste. Way to go!”

Build extra minutes into your daily routines to allow your child to complete tasks without being hurried — such as putting on his own socks, buckling her own seat belt, etc.

These are all great but I particularly like the last one. Chronic parental rushing stunts the development of initiative in children.