To make your child more resilient, you need to let her fail. Failure is an important experience from which we learn for the future.
In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment and frustration, and you often have to start again.
While this is logical, failure actually has the opposite effect.
The problem is, in our efforts to protect children, we take valuable opportunities for learning away from them. Failure provides benefits that cannot be gained any other way. Failure is a gift disguised as a bad experience. Failure is not the absence of success, but the experience of failure on the way to success.
When we fail, we experience negative emotions such as disappointment or frustration. When children are protected from these feelings they can believe they are powerless and have no control over things.
So, the answer is not to avoid failure, but to learn how to cope with small failures. Protecting children from these events is more likely to increase their vulnerability and weaknesses than to promote resilience. When adults remove failure so children do not have to experience it, they become more vulnerable to future experiences of failure.
One of the greatest gifts failure brings is we learn natural consequences to our decisions. It’s a very simple concept developed by early behaviourists: “when I do X, Y happens” or “If I don’t study, I will fail.”
Allowing children to experience these outcomes teaches them the power of their decisions.
When parents and teachers derail this process by protecting children from failure, they also stand in the way of natural consequences. Studies show children who are protected from failure are more depressed and less satisfied with life in adulthood.
Mistakes are the essence of learning. As we have new experiences and develop competence, it’s inevitable we make mistakes. If failure is held as a sign of incompetence and something that should be avoided (rather than a normal thing), children will start to avoid the challenges necessary for learning.
Failure is only a gift if students see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. This depends on their mindset. Parents must help them to set their mind that it’s okay to fail as long as there’s an effort to overcome failure in the future.
