My daughter Liliana is a perfectionist. She does not like to attempt anything new until she is confident that she will be able to be successful. At times she will sneak away to practice in private before she is ready to share with others. It is overwhelming for her and has affected all different aspects of her life. It has given her anxiety is different situations and held her back from activities she would of otherwise enjoyed.
A few nights ago I was at an activity with the ladies from my church congregation. One of the ladies who has taught the children’s music lessons for the past year came over to me and said “Lili is the most confident little girl I have ever met. Nothing phases her and she is always willing to try something new”. I almost cried because I know how far she has come.
How did we go from a child who was deadly afraid of failure to a child who is confident and ready to take on the world? We taught her how to fail.
Why is Failure Important for Kids?
Failure is something we naturally want to avoid both for ourselves and our children. The truth is failure is a part of life, a big part of life at that. You can not go through life and avoid it.
Protecting our children is what we are taught to do. The need to protect them is innate, but what if protecting them from failure was actually hurting them more? Recently I have noticed that there has been this change in parents wanting to protect their children from failure in an effort to not damage their self esteem or self worth. This is not working though. Now more than ever there are teenagers and even young adults who simply can’t cope with the realities of the real world because they have had very limited exposure to failure. There are so many examples of “everyone gets a prize” and being able to resit test until you pass type mentalities.
Faillure is important. But it is more than that, it is how we teach children to deal with failure. Failure teaches children how to cope. When we give them the opportunities to experience smaller failures we in turn let them feel the emotions that come with it. The disappointment, sadness and anger. If children are protected from these emotions or we rush in and try to fix them they will never learn how to do it for themselves. It is HARD to do. No parent wants to see their child hurting.
Failure is important because it teaches natural consequences. We use a lot of love and Logic in our home which is primary based on natural consequences. Natural consequences and failure go hand in hand many time. When we allow children the ownership over their choices they are then better able to handle the consequences of those choices even if they are negative. For example yesterday my seven year old took a toy to the park and lost it. He failed to look after his toy appropriately and therefore lost the toy. He was understandably upset but he was aware that it was his choice to bring it and that he was the one that lost it. There was no blame game and he own the failure and later said that next time he will probably just leave his small toys in the car.
When we let our kids fail they are learning. Every time they attempt a task and fail they learn a little more until they eventually succeed. Failure breeds resilience. Challenge is necessary for learning. If a child is never challenge they will never reach the abilities that they are truely capable of.
How to Teach Kids How to Fail?
Praise Effort not Ability
We live in the world of participation trophies. No matter what a kid does they can’t fail because we are too worried about hurting their delicate self esteems. Believe it or not kids are tougher than many people give them credit for. Reseach has indicated that doing this actually has the opposite effect.
Children who were praised for person based praise, for example “you are so smart, You are so pretty, You are so gifted etc” were more likely to avoid tasks that may result in failure because the fear of not living up to the expectation was too risky.
On the other hand children who received praise for the efforts were more willing to take on more challenging tasks despite the risk of failure. This is because their praise wasn’t based on who they were it was based on their effort. Children can control how much effort they put in but they can’t control if someone perceives them as smart or beautiful.
If you wanted to praise effort rather than ability you could use phrases such as:
- Wow you worked really hard at that
- I can see how much time you have put in
- You have really focused hard on this
- I can see how much your hard work has paid off
- You have concentrated really well in class today
- I can tell you have been practicing
- You have really dedicated a lot of effort to this work
- I can see you persevering
- You tried really hard
Change Your Mindset Around Failure
Failure is more often than not thought of as a negative. Try to switch that around and instead view it as a positive. Children can and do learn from failure. Use it as an opportunity to see where they went wrong and what they may want to try differently the next time. Let failure be the stepping stone not the boulder in the middle of the road.
Allow Natural Consequences to occur
If there is not any serious harm going to come to your child from the choice they have made then let them face the consequence. Love and Logic Parenting is good for this. For example if your child wants to try out for a sports team but doesn’t put in any effort to train and consequently doesn’t get picked let them experience that. Don’t go in to bat for them trying to justify their way onto the team to the coach. Love them, and show sympathy for them but use it as a time to teach them rather than berate the coach. I have a family member who would quit everything as soon as he began to experience failure. In turn he would pass the blame onto his coaches or teachers for not recognising his abilities or not doing their job properly. His parents would then join in on this attack against everyone and everything for their son’s failures. This didn’t help him in any way, shape or form. There was no learning or growth and his self esteem and mental health deteriorated as a result.
Let Your Child Feel the Emotions
Failure comes with a whole host of nasty emotions that no one wants to feel. Disappointment, embarrassment, anger, frustration, and self pity are just to name a few.
These are big emotions. Let your child express them and help guide them through how to deal with them. Don’t be tempted to bury them or elevate them by trying to fix everything. Children need to learn the skills they need to deal with these big feelings. They can not learn these skills without unfortunately experiencing the emotions.
Love them through it. Don’t try to fix it, just love them and let them cry if they need to. If they need to go outside punch something let them. If they want to scream into a pillow that’s okay too. Once they have let it out then is your time to come in and talk and teach. Share your experiences with them, help them to see the other side of situations and once again just love them.
Build Up Their Self Esteem
As parents we are always concerned and worried about how our children view themselves and what their self esteem is like. Suicide among teenagers is skyrocketing, even very young children are taking their own lives.
We need to do all that we can to guard our children’s self esteem and self worth so that should the bullies come knocking or those feeling of self doubt creep in they will hopefully be able to pull through to the other side. I won’t even pretend to understand how and why bullying occurs. Bullying and mental health are huge issues for children today. I won’t even pretend to understand it all.
Be genuine in your praise for your children. Celebrate their efforts rather than their achievements. You may have a child who has worked their butt off on an assignment and still not received a top mark. You also may have a child who put zero effort in and received a top grade with no problem. Which child do you think deserves the most praise and recognition? Not all children are going to be top academics or stellar athletes. I don’t care if my children get the best marks, or win first place I care and celebrate that they gave it 100% of their effort regardless of the outcome.
Find things that will challenge your children in a safe environment first. If your child is very adverse to failure as my Liliana was find ways for them to experience failure in a safe environment. We started doing this with Lili when it was just her and I completing a task somewhere alone. Then we moved to doing it in a room with other people around, then to doing activities with other people. Eventually she was confident enough that she was happy to go and do whatever she wanted without me or her Dad or sibling present for support. A few weeks ago I watched her go rock climbing with zero assistance from anyone. She raced up those walls like Spiderman! Next weekend she will sing onstage in front of several thousand people. And you know what I will be doing? Bawling my eyes out in the front row because that’s what mother’s do.
Incredible Resources For Teaching Failure to Children and Boosting their Self Esteem the Right Way
We have used the resources put out by a company called The Big Life Journal. I can talk about them for days and days for what they have done for my children and I am sure for children everywhere. What I would do is purchase their journal first. There is a children’s one and a teens one. The teens one is for kids 11+. They are beautiful guided journals for your child to do with a buddy (usually mom or dad) over 26 weeks. They introduced skills and ideas to help your children grow and develop a mindset of failure is not the end, perseverance, and how you can change the world. They are truely wonderful gifts you can give your children as they are growing up in this crazy world.
After you have bought the journal you can look through all the amazing printables they have. I have bought so many. I usually go and look for something based on what my children are struggling with at the time. We have done quite a few on self love and gratitude. Liliana has done quite a few colouring pages to put on the wall by her bed that have positive affirmations about failure and how failure can help her brain grow. There really are so many really awesome challenges and activities you can do there.
These are some of my all time favourite homeschooling resources. I love to use them as a part of our morning basket routine. Or if the subject matter is a bit more personal I like to take the kids out on a little date and work on it or even at home by ourselves. They love that bit of alone time with mom and dad too.
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