I think every parent really wants to see their children succeed in life.

One of the best ways you can help your child do that is to encourage them to eliminate excuses from their mindset and vocabulary.

I'm John Fuller, along with our vice president of parenting,

Dr. Danny Werther, and we're going to return now to a conversation

that focused president and author Jim

Daly and I had with parenting researcher and child advocate Dr. Kathy Cook.

She addresses something she called four explanatory styles.

Kathy, we all tell ourselves stories to make sense of problems and successes, actually.

You refer to this as explanatory style, and then you say there's four elements underneath that so

what is it and talk about each one?

Yeah I appreciate that.

Let me just start with a really simple example and then we can unpack it.

That helps me.

Okay, no, seriously, my dog ate the homework, right?

That's an explanation for what went wrong.

All of us tell ourselves little stories inside our head to

justify what happened. So kind of a classic would be a child who goes to school

purposely doesn't do homework, purposely forgets it because she knows it's not well done,

but says to the teacher instead, my dog ate the homework, you know, or we blame, you know, my baby sister was crying and I couldn't concentrate.

So explanatory style is huge when it comes to resiliency.

Four parts.

One is the personalization, who is responsible?

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