3 Steps to Help Your Child Grow from Failure
f3 Steps to Help Your Child Grow from Failure.
Imagine that you are incredibly successful. Everything comes to you easily, effortlessly. It is as though you float through your beautiful life. Everyone likes you and you never make a mistake. You never need to apologize. Everything you draw is a masterpiece, every tune you whistle the next hit on the pop charts. Everything you try in school or business is an instant success. You have all the money you could want, and anyone you think is cute instantly falls in love with you. People even do everything they can do to please you. Do you find something frustrating about them? No need to learn patience; they will change it instantly.
How does that sound to you? Perhaps you thought, “Pretty darn good.” But after about 10 seconds of contemplating it you might recognize that it would be horribly lonely and boring.
Now imagine something simpler, like your kids making a lego set. Your child’s hands fly over the pieces as they seem to almost put themselves together. Then your child looks up at you and says, “I’m bored, what’s next.”
What about how it usually goes? Your child looks intensely at the directions and slowly puts the pieces together. Maybe he growls in frustration when he realizes he put a piece on wrong and has to go back a few steps. Maybe she cries for you to help her when she decides it’s too hard. And then maybe your child gets a quick assist from you or maybe fixes it herself, but she keeps going and finishes it. He looks up at you with shining pride-filled eyes and says, “I did it! Look at what I made!” And later that night your child, who sometimes avoids trying new challenges because she’s afraid she’ll fail says to you, “I’m good at doing hard things. I’m going to do a lego set tomorrow too.” And your heart feels like it will burst out of your chest in your pride and happiness.
Or maybe it went a little differently. Maybe your child cried out for help and you jumped in and rescued him. Maybe you took over all the hard bits and helped him finish. After all, you’ve heard you need to help kids feel good about themselves and he was not feeling good about himself when he was saying it was too hard for him. And when the lego set is finished, the one that you really built for him, your child looks up at you and says, “You are so good at building legos.”
Or maybe when your child got frustrated and asked for help you said, “Shake it off. Just keep trying,” and went away. And later you discovered she had given up in frustration. “Why did you give up?” You ask her. “Legos are stupid,” she snaps.
The Experts are Worried.
Lately the experts have been writing and speaking a lot about how we parents are not doing enough to teach our kids how to fail. In an excellent piece in the NY Times the writers describe how “In order to develop extraordinary leaders” West Point officers put students through combat simulations where failure will occur. They then ask students to review their mistakes with an AAR (After Action Review). Learning from failure is built right into the training process. “Failure is expected throughout life, but having the ability to learn from failure is considered a key path to growth. Learning from failure leads to humility, adaptation, and resiliency;” the writers say, “unfortunately, most students are taught to fear failure from a young age.”
Why do we teach our kids to fear failure? Because we fear failure. It is natural to pass our fears to them, and we often do it in our behaviors, without even noticing what we are doing.
Why do we fear failure?
I do not think we actually fear failure. What we fear is the bad feelings that come from failure. Even worse, we fear the identity crisis that can come from failure. We fear what it says about our worth; we fear shame.
But why, when if we are honest failure is part of everything we do, does it threaten our sense of worth? I think it is because we are not honest about failure. We pretend it is something exceptional, something that doesn’t happen constantly. Or we pretend it only counts if it is big. Putting a lego on wrong is not a failure, it’s part of the process. But failing a test: now that is a failure. Why? What is the difference? It is only a matter of degree.
Failure is not exceptional. It is a constant part of every endeavor. It was a part of the writing this article. I spent weeks thinking about it and wrote 6 pages of material which was not working at all. Then I threw all of it out and wrote this. “Oh no,” you might say, “That’s not failure. That’s the creative process. All writers say that’s how it works.” Yes. Exactly.
Fixed Mindset or Growth Mindset
So throwing out 6 pages of material and hours of work either represents a waste of time and failure until I got to something good, or it represents a useful part of the process during which I sorted out my ideas to eventually get to something good. What is the difference? It’s mindset.
The first view demonstrates a fixed mindset. The NY Times authors say, “students with fixed mindsets are convinced that failing a test means they are not meant to succeed. Conversely, a growth mindset paints failure as a chance for growth—showing students where improvements can be made, and which errors to avoid.” So the second view, that those hours of work I threw out where a productive part of the process comes from a growth mindset.
I was always amazed in college at the way that the guys I hung out with were so much better with computers than I was. I was just as smart as they were, but I accepted that men were just better, or maybe it was the socialization thing and their Dads had taught them stuff the girls weren’t taught. I would call them when I needed help with my computer because it crashed. But after a number of times watching what they did when they were working with a computer (because I wanted to learn how to do it myself), I finally realized they didn’t know anything more than I did. The difference was that they would just sit down and start pressing buttons and messing with things, and I wouldn’t do anything until I was sure of what the right thing to do was, for fear of making things worse.
I had a fixed mindset. If I pressed the wrong button I obviously had no idea what I was doing and should stop trying. My friends had a growth mindset. They felt sure they could get in there and mess around until they figured it out.
Wait, isn’t she a doctor?
Before we go further, I should probably address the obvious. What about situations where mistakes just can’t happen, like in the practice of medicine? Right! I am not suggesting that mistakes are just okay. Medical mistakes are so serious that we are kept in training for many years so that we have lots of time to practice with oversight until we can go into full medicine without a risk of making big mistakes. Even so, medical institutions have mistakes reporting systems so we can constantly improve. The old culture of medicine was driven by shame about mistakes: no one could talk about them. That made improving processes to prevent them hard, which sometimes led to more mistakes. Now we are all trying to build something called the culture of safety so mistakes can be reviewed and productive changes made.
Did you notice that? When people are ashamed to admit mistakes, they make more mistakes. Truly admitting and addressing mistakes is the opposite of minimizing their importance.
Only by being open to facing failure, can we avoid repeated failure. A growth mindset is the mindset that finds solutions.
How do we change our mindset from fixed to growth?
The key is actually frustration tolerance. (link to price of privilege here) We have to be able to tolerate the discomfort in order to move though a situation and find the creative answers. It’s hard to tolerate that frustration ourselves, but it’s even harder to tolerate that for our children.
However, if you’ve been reading these articles, then you already have a tool to do this. The 4S method is actually a way to practice the habit of a growth mindset. I snuck all kinds of cool brain science stuff into the process of “Every time you feel a Should, Stop, Sigh, See and then Try Something.” Shoulds are all about a fixed mindset driven by shame. The stop, sigh and see steps shift you out of a fixed mindset into your own leadership and and ideas. The try something step is all about a growth mindset that sees failures as part of the growth process. And the more you practice this method the more growth minded you will become.
Okay so how does this connect to failure? When you practice the 4S’s you are regularly moving out of your shame driven, fixed mindset shoulds into your own creative leadership and ideas. The very nature of the Try Something step is experiment. It is the embodiment of a growth mindset because it helps you see quickly that whether you fail or succeed, you are getting better all the time. It’s so fast and simple. The more you practice it the more your mindset will open up into a world of possibilities and growth.
I suspect you are still wondering about the three steps to help your kids with failure.
What is failure, really?
Failure is what happens when we attempt something that is beyond our resources. If we had had all the resources we needed working for us at that time, we would have succeeded.
So the ideal response to failure is to obtain more resources. There are two types of resources we need: the skills for the task and the emotional resources to tolerate frustration.
Let’s go back to the legos. The ideal response on the part of the parent was to go to the child who was failing and too frustrated to continue trying. The wise parent would then help the child calm down to the point that they could take a look at the problem again and then encourage them to try again themselves. This parent neither leaves the child alone with overwhelming feelings, nor tries to overprotect from those feelings.
The three steps to help your child with failure are 3 F’s:
1. Face it. 2. Feel it. 3. Fiddle with it.
Face it.
As long as failure is too painful to accept, it keeps us stuck. If we avoid it, it becomes shameful and unacceptable. In fact, even when we are guilty of the unacceptable, still the only way to grow from it is to face it realistically. What happened? How did we contribute? What can we learn?
Feel it.
This is not the second step. Sometimes you have to do this with yourself or your child before you can get to face it. Allow your child to feel the disappointment, the frustration, even the embarrassment of their failure. And stay with them as calmly as you can. Just be there with your child’s feelings and don’t try to talk them out of them. Try reflecting their feelings compassionately.
Fiddle with it.
This is just like Try Something. Or like my college friends and the computers. I would love for my kids to have the same confidence those guys did that if they just fiddled with it, they would figure out how to make it work. But sometimes they don’t have that confidence. That’s okay. If I can encourage them to fiddle with it until they have success, later they approach new tasks with more confidence.
Maybe the failure is over and can't be corrected. That's okay! Kids have great imaginations. Have them fiddle and tinker with the situation in their minds to visualize their approach next time.
Sometimes fiddling with the task can produce frustration and a feeling of failure, so as you can see from my amateur drawing, you can move back and more between the 3 F's until you get to confident or success.
Did you enjoy this article? Next week I'll talk about responding to failure with grit, and what is Better than Grit. Don't miss it. Subscribe here. Or learn more about The Primary Carer.
Disclaimer: This article represents general education and does not constitute medical advice. My ideas are mine alone.