Sarah, a 14-year old, leading scorer of her school basketball team. Few weeks ago, she returned home from school devastated. When her tensed parents inquired her, she just replied, ” I am not capable of anything”. Though her parents understood she didn’t win the trophy as she lost the game. Sarah didn’t learn that failure is not the end, its part of success. Teaching kids about failure is very important where there are lot of pressures on kids to accomplish too many things.
Failure is inevitable, so children should learn to accept this fact. If not, life will be vulnerable. As from young age, a child goes through many missteps, imperfections, rejections. Children have to necessarily built their tolerance level to face these challenges. Hence, skill of facing failures and to overcome them must be taught to children.
Why Kids Fear Failure ?
Kids are not born with fear. Their past experiences lead to sense of panic to be failure or trying out something new. There are many reasons behind a child’s fear of failing like :-
1) Conditional Love From Parents : Children get conscious about their self-worth that has been set by their parents. They believe that if they can’t achieve something that is planned to be, their parents are not going to love them. They think their failure may loose their parents’ support and pride.
2) Pressure Of Being Perfect : Many times strict parents expect their child to be perfect in everything. In these cases, children are not able to accept the state of imperfection. They get scared of failures or any thing that is less than perfection.
3) Negative Reactions : If a child experiences negative comments or judgemental comments from the people around them, they loose their self-esteem. This too leads to fear of failure. They are not able to handle their emotions of disappointment. They lack emotional intelligence.
4) Absence Of Coping skills : Healthy coping skills help children to handle the adversities of life with strength and positivity. They learn to bounce back and become resilient in life. And lack of coping skills develop a fear to face the failures. They avoid to try something new or different due to fear of failure.
The Science Of Learning From Failure
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” — Paulo Coelho
First thing first is that teach children to believe that failure is not the end. It is a stepping stone to build their castle. Teaching kids about failure makes them more ready to face the challenges. Setbacks in life if handled right way, will surely speed up growth. As resilient child takes the adversities as opportunities to reflect back. Failure has the magical power that make you stronger each time you fail. Children can use this magical power when they look back their mistakes and learn to analyze them. Self-reflection helps to learn from the mistakes and make more prepared to face the challenge.
Children should learn not to take failures with heavy emotions, this may shake their confidence level. They start feel insufficient and worthless. Instead they should know the skill of using the power of learning from failures. Failures give scope to improve, learning from experiences. And getting better each time we face negative outcomes with the intention of learning.
Every inventions till date have gone through many failure steps before reaching the final milestone. So this is a great lesson for kids to know. Scientists while performing researches learn from each failed steps and unveil new ways to solve the problems.
Often the missteps taken in the process that lead to failure teaches you what not to do in future to achieve your goal. Hence, teach children that each failure is a learning that teaches us what not to repeat and actively learn other approaches to seek solution.
10 Proven Strategies For Teaching Kids About Failure
1) Normalize Failure Through Stories
The most important thing to keep in mind while teaching kids about failure is normalizing failure. Kids should understand failure is not a big deal. It is just part of the process. If your child faces failure, don’t go for any extreme reactions. Like don’t blame them for the outcome, it will discourage them from trying again. Neither express any sadness or grief. Always normalize the situations, focus on their effort. Teach them to analyze their mistakes and apply them when they attempt to try again.
Bring up open communication with your child and share your own personal stories of failures and bouncing back. This helps children to feel safe and accept failure normally. Normalizing failures and moving on promotes a growth mindset in children. They don’t fear to try again and again.
2) Model Resilience
Children do what they see people around them doing not what they are told to do. So if we want our children to overcome failures with strength and positive mindset, we need modeling resilience for children. When children observe their parents and teachers managing stress calmly. Learning from their mistakes, children also understand how to bounce back from setbacks. They know to embrace mistakes as opportunity to learn and grow better.
When adults model resilience, children learn to be flexible in life. They know if there are failures in the way, there are alternative paths too to reach the goal. Children having this mindset can also manages their emotions very well. They accept the fact of life that failures are disappointing but never leave the hope to try and achieve again.
3) Introducing The Learning Pit Model
Educational thinker James Nottingham developed The Learning Pit Model in order to foster resilience in students. Introduce the learning pit model to kids to teach them not to give up. This is a framework that refers learning as a process that goes through a deep pit. Here pit demonstrates the challenges, confusions, struggles and failures one faces in the journey of learning.
The concept behind this model is that one has to cover different stages of learning to achieve a deep knowledge. This helps children to understand that struggles, confusion, failures are not the end, but a deep pit that you can pass with strength to climb up to the zenith.
4) Analyzing The Root Cause Of Failure
No one feels good to fail, but failure is our best teacher of life. It teaches us the mistakes and shows what not to repeat again. Because when children learn to analyze their failures, they observe what wrong happened that led to negative outcome. And when they find the root cause of the problem, it gets easy for them to find the solution.
Encourage kids to do self-reflection so that they can analyze their problems well. If the cause of failure remains unknown to children, they can never learn from them. Due to this there are very high chances of repeating same mistakes again and in future children may start making excuses to try again due to fear of failure. Thus always have an open communication with your child encouraging him/her to analyze their failures.
5) Praising Effort Over Results
Failure always question one’s capability and self-worth. Children facing failures may think themselves as incapable of the tasks. So they loose confidence to try again due to fear of failure. Hence, best way to take away the fear of failure from them is to make them feel worthy. Acknowledge the effort they gave in the process. Let them know, results may not be in their favor but one thing that truly matters is their effort.
Teaching kids about failure involves highlighting the effort and strategies applied in the process encourages children to learn more. When a child’s dedication is praised, this fosters his/her capabilities to accept new challenges. Children are keen to learn their mistakes and develop a growth mindset.
You may like to read : How To Build Confidence In Children
6) Build Emotional Tolerance
Building emotional tolerance means preparing the mind to handle the intense emotions without over reacting or being impulsive. To build emotional tolerance in children, teach them the RAIN method, a concept invented by Michele McDonald and developed by Tara Brach.
RAIN method is mindfulness technique that involves four step to build emotional tolerance. The steps are :-
- Recognize (R) :- Recognizing the emotion of present moment and acknowledge what is happening.
- Allow (A) :- Accepting the situation as it is without being over reactive or impulsive
- Investigate (I) :- Investigating the situation with interest and curiosity to learn from the experiences.
- Nurture (N) :- Instead of feeling overwhelming due to intense emotions, be compassionate to yourself. It can be done by practicing mind calming techniques and mindfulness.
7) Teach Positive Self-Talk
The fear of failure weakens an individual’s self-esteem. Teaching kids about failure should always include the habit of positive self-talk. The fear of loosing impacts the inner strength. To overcome the fear of failure, it is necessary to change a child’s mindset. Mentally children should be prepared for the failures, they should take it as a progress in their learning journey. And it is possible only when parents and educators teach positive self-talk to kids.
Failures happen because of some mistakes, and teaching positive self-talk to kids involves reframing those mistakes as learning opportunities using positive affirmations for kids. The key point behind this is rephrasing their thoughts like instead of saying,” I can’t do it” say “I can try it again”.
8) Reframe Failure As A Step Towards Growth
When a child learns to take failures as opportunities to grow they need to reframe their failures. Like they have adopt the “yet” language technique that make them belief that its not the end. They need to learn more to develop more skills to overcome the hurdles. Using “yet” in the statements boosts their self-confidence. Like instead of saying ,”I don’t know the solution of this problem” say,” I don’t know the solution of this problem yet”.
Using “yet” language technique in statements signals our brain that failures are not the limit, there is always a chance to learn and grow. This changes the perspective from dead end to starting again. It encourages our mind to be resilient and bounce back.
9) Practicing Progress Journal
Journalling helps to focus our mind in the process rather than the end result. And this helps mind to analyze the mistakes, celebrating little wins of each day. When children document their journey, they reframe their failures as trying something and learning more. It helps children to be patient and plan more mindfully.
If practice writing their daily journal, they share their emotions in the journal. This helps them to acknowledge their emotions and a healthy way to cope with that. Teaching kids about failure should focus on getting out the fear of failure from them. Documenting make children mentally strong with clear thought process.
10) Learning To Behave Predictably During Failure
When results are predictable, emotions are in control. So when children learn that they may face obstacles or failures in the process, they don’t react too much. Instead their mind is shifted to analyze their failures. Always teach your child to embrace the feelings of failure but not to dwell on it.
When children learn to behave predictably during failure, they don’t blame themselves or anyone for their failure. They start doing self reflection and start planning to try with new approach. So when teaching kids about failure, make children aware that there may be hardships and failures in their way but that is normal. And hence foster resilience in them to bounce back.
Common Parenting Mistakes To Avoid While Teaching Kids About Failure
Parents actions and reactions greatly impacts children and the way they deal with failures. Parents do make mistakes when dealing with child’s failure. When teaching kids about failure parents should avoid the common mistakes like :-
Fixing child’s problem every time : Unintentionally parents behavior causes damage to child’s development. When children struggle with something, parents being protective in nature, rushes to solve their children’s problem. This hinders children problem solving learning skill. They loose the intention of trying again.
Criticizing Failure : When parents set their expectations too high, they find it very difficult to normalize their child’s failure. Sometimes parents also use harsh statements and become too judgemental towards their children. These situations develop a sense of fear of failures in children.
Focusing on results : Many times parents accolades positive outcomes and dismiss the feelings when failed to achieve success. Children understand their effort will only be praised if they are successful. In case of failures, if their efforts goes unnoticed they don’t get any motivation to try again. Hence, when teaching kids about failure parents should focus on the effort given by the child rather than praising only the positive outcomes.
Conclusion
Perfection is a myth. No one is perfect, parents and children both make mistakes. And failures are part of life. So being parents, we should learn how to teach kids not to fear failure and accept it as an opportunity to learn.
