Teaching The Importance Of Failure
Every parent wants their child to be successful, to do that best they can in everything they do. Parents push their children to get straight A’s, all while maintaining a social life, extracurricular activities, and working towards their future. Not only is the pressure to succeed hard on children, but parents often become too involved in their children’s life to let them fail, which may seem like a good thing, but isn’t. Failure helps to build character and allows people to learn from their mistakes. Teaching your child that failure is bad, is more harmful than letting them fail.
Teaching your child that failure is okay may be difficult to do, but this can help them to understand that mistakes can help them to succeed. However, teaching your child to fail must be done right, you want to make sure they know that failure only means that can learn from their mistakes, not give up. This is why we teach our children about failing because we want them to learn and grow from it, not quit because of it.
While you may not want your child to fail at all, eventually they will, and when they do it is important for them to know that from failure comes success. Many people who were taught that failure is a bad thing may have been successful for so long, but everyone fails eventually, and the difference is what you do with that failure. People who are scared to fail may give up more easily out of the fear of failing again. For this reason, it is important to teach our children to fail and to come back from their failures.
Your child’s success is important, but helping them develop the right mindset about failure and hard work can help them to reach success and be more confident when they do fail. At Resurrection Christian School, we want our students to succeed just as much as you do, and we maintain a 100 percent graduation rate while offering unique and rigorous courses. We work hard to help our students succeed and offer college prep for our high school students, allowing them to properly prepare for their future.
There are certain precautions you want to take when teaching your children about failure. Helping them to have the right mindset about their abilities can help them to overcome failure and become successful. In this blog, we will cover different lessons to teach your child about failure and how you can help them to perceive failure as a learning opportunity.
Parents Mindset
The truth of the matter is that parents have a huge impact on the way their children view the world and their mindset on different matters. An NPR article takes a deeper look at a parent’s effect on their children. In this article, they mention that children who view their abilities as something that can change overtime handle obstacles, such as failure, in more constructive ways. Parents can help kids to develop this mindset.
The way parents react to their children’s failures and mistakes can alter the way the kids view their abilities and intelligence. The NPR article quotes Kyla Haimovitz, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Haimovitz says that parents need to react in certain ways to help their children develop this mindset, that abilities can be improved with hard work and to not give up. If your child comes home with a bad grade on a test, the way you react could change the way your child thinks. Saying something that implies they are better in other subject and reassuring them that they still have talent in other areas may seem like a good response, but it could also tell them that they should give up in the subject they got the bad score in since they have other areas they are better at. You want your children to keep working at these things and try improving their skills and knowledge, so saying they are better in other areas may send the wrong message.
Haimovitz and her colleague, Carol Dweck, conducts studies to see how a parent’s view on failure changed the cay the children feel about their abilities and intelligence. They found that “the more parents believed that failure is debilitating, the more likely their children were to see them as concerned with their performance outcomes and grades rather than their learning and improvement.”
After surveying parents about their feelings towards their children coming home with a failing quiz grade, they found that parents who saw failure as an opportunity believed their children could still improve in the subject. They were more likely to ask their children what they have learned from the quiz, what they can still learn, and if their child asking for a teacher’s help would be useful. The study concluded that a parent’s reaction to failure directly caused the child’s beliefs.
The point of all of this is to react to your child’s failures and setbacks in a way that helps them and gives them a desire to improve. Rather than focusing on their abilities and whether their abilities can improve, focus on how they can improve and what they can learn from their mistakes.
Dealing With Failure
After you realize that your perception on failure matters to your child’s beliefs, it will be easier for you to help them deal with failure. Your child will fail at something eventually, everyone does, but the way you help them deal with it is what is important.
An article from Child Mind® Institute lists out the process of teaching your child to fail, provided by Dr. Amanda Mintzer, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute. The first step is to show empathy. Your child will be disappointed when they fail, especially if they did work hard. Don’t brush off their feelings, rather tell them that you understand their disappointment and know they wanted to do better and worked hard to do better. Help your children understand that failures happen in life, to everyone. Letting them know that you have failed many times before can help them see that from failure comes success.
The way you react to failure can help your child learn how to react as well. If you take it as a learning opportunity, they will develop that same mindset and try learning from their mistakes rather than giving up. When your child fails, talk with them about what they could do differently next time or what they can learn from their failures. If they failed a test, help them figure out how to study differently or what to study. We have all failed tests before because we studied the wrong material or we did not study the right way. Helping them figure out the best ways to study or learn from their mistakes can help them to grow and avoid the same failures in the future.
Using Failure As An Opportunity
Teach your child to try again. Giving up will never help them reach success and trying again may be scary, especially after failing, but it is important. Teach them that perseverance can help them to reach their goals and be successful. If your child is having a hard time using their failure as an opportunity, share these quotes with them from Forbes, from very successful people, who have all failed before.
Failing is the best learning experience we can get. It teaches us what not to do, allows us to think about what to do differently, and helps us build character. Experiencing failure and other setbacks can help a child (and adults) to become more humble and allows them to learn how to be a good sport about it. Teaching your child to have a good attitude after a failure is important as well. While it may be hard to put a smile on your face and try again, it is important and can help other people view you differently.
If your child gives up after failing, they will never learn the importance of perseverance and they will quit every time they run into a complication. Whether your child fails a test or loses a game, teaching them that they can improve and do better next time can help them to not feel completely defeated. Working hard to do better on the next game or test can help them to build a better work ethic and can lead them to success. The true failure quits rather than trying again.
No one wants to fail. But failing is one of the best things we can do because it helps us build character, learn from our mistakes, and work even harder to reach success. Failure helps us to develop a more positive mindset about our intelligence and how we can improve. Many parents push their children to succeed, which we all obviously want, but those children who fear failure will take it so much harder when they do fail. Teaching our children that failure is nothing but a learning opportunity and a chance to try again in important and will change the way they view failure. To be successful, you must first know how to fail and how to come back from that setback.
At Resurrection Christian School, we don’t want our students to fail, but we do want them to understand that failures happen to everyone. And more importantly, we want them to know how to use that failure as a positive in their life, learn from it, and be successful the next time they try something. Teach your child how to fail and help them to succeed. We can help your child prepare for the future and all the setbacks they may face, and how to deal with them. Learn more about our school, and set your child on the path to success.