Cooping with failure in life is an important skill for children to learn. Recently, I wrote an article on why it is important to let children fail once in a while. I wanted to expand on the article by providing ways to support children during times that they may fail and feel frustrated.
- Share Your Own Stories Of Failure: Taking the time to relate to children by being vulnerable and sharing times when you failed is a way to show them that failing is normal. Share what you learned from your failures and how you grew from them. Ask them what they may have learned from their recent failure.
- Continue To Share Your Fails: Share stories of your current developmentally appropriate risks and failures with them. Talk about how you are feeling and what you are currently doing to help get past your own failure. Allow them to share their ideas of how you can move past your failure.
- Share Famous Stories: When children look at famous successful people, they are often not exposed to their backstory. They assume that success has come to famous people with little or no effort or failure. Have children research the journey someone famous that they idolize. This will help them understand that all people fail from time to time, even successful people. In fact, most successful people have most likely had more failure that the average person. .. this has allowed them to grow.
- Teach Them About A Growth Mindset: Teach children that a growth mindset is about always being able to learn and move forward. Children with a growth mindset recognize what is easy and hard for them. The difference between a child that has a growth mindset and one that has a fixed mindset, is that the child with a growth mindset understand that they can continue learning in the easy AND hard areas.
- Watch Out For Anxiety: Sometimes students that are afraid of failure also have anxiety. If this is the case, consider finding resources that help with anxiety. Breathing exercises, grounding strategies and talking to professionals ( school counselor or LPC) about anxiety can help with successful coping strategies.
Failure is something we all experience and with a little bit of empathy, understanding, research, and resources, we can help children feel successful and confident during their times of failure!