Teach Resilience by Asking Children for Help When You Have Failure
Failure is a major buzzword in parenting today: to raise successful, hardy children, we must let them fail . If your child has forgotten homework or a baseball glove at home, do not bring it back to him. If she is trying to build a tower from blocks or later, term paper or even later (God forbid), having time for the first job on time, do not interfere. Only by struggling, and sometimes by failure, children learn exactly what they must do in order to be successful.
What about us parents? Much of parenting culture is also about getting it right the first time – getting kids into the right school, preparing nutritious and time-consuming meals, and keeping their temperament 100% in check. As parents, we also don’t allow ourselves a lot of room for failure.
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and author for the New York Times , asks what would happen if we recognized our own struggles not only with ourselves, but also with our children.
Grant argues that by talking openly about our failures and failures, we “normalize struggles,” and that normalizing struggles helps children not fall apart when they face failure.
He gives an example from his family life: when he was nervous before giving a big speech, his daughter gave him some good (really, good! I’ll remember her advice the next time I have to speak in public) about finding the friendliest audience member and direct conversation with this person. A few weeks later, when she was nervous about her school performance, he reminded her of her previous wise advice.
Grant recognizes that all children have problems, from serious to relatively minor, such as failing an exam or being abandoned by society. By allowing them to participate in our struggle, we give them the tools to withstand adversity and analyze how to avoid them in the future. The first thing in my family: how a mother cannot control her temperament 100%.
h / t Mind / Shift in KQED