Your son tried out for the middle school basketball team and didn’t make it. Your daughter wanted a part in her school play, but wasn’t chosen. What is your response when things don’t go your child’s way? Perhaps a better question might be, “What can you teach your children through the inevitable disappointments of life?”

Talk About It

When the time is right, it pays to face disappointments and failures head-on. A “this what you wanted, but this is the reality” kind of talk. Sometimes there will be tangled feelings when a disappointment comes like blaming others for the situation or expressing self-deprecations such as “I can’t do anything right.” It’s helpful for your child to vent frustration when the feelings are raw and painful, but then guide the discussion to a more positive place.

It Hurts

Allow some time to explore the sadness and pain of a big disappointment or a performance blunder. If the failure was due to lack of preparation, there will also follow a period of analysis of the situation. What went wrong? Or maybe hard facts must be faced. She may never be class president or lead singer in the chorus. Maybe others are more well-suited, more talented. What then? Can you be the voice of reason guiding your child to a healthy realization of his or her unique gifts? No one is good at everything. Where can she find success? What are realistic goals he can achieve?

The Role of Mistakes

Beyond the disappointment of one traumatic life experience looms a much larger truth. Making mistakes is an essential part of learning. Think of your baby learning to walk. How many bumps and falls did it take before she toddled toward you without stumbling? No one thinks of that process as a series of failures. Rather, we realize the child has to practice before attaining success. And that principle can be applied to nearly everything we learn in life. In her book, “Allow Your Children to Fail if You Want Them to Succeed,” Dr. Avril Beckford says, “Failure is inevitable, so what becomes important is how parents help their children to deal with it.”

Children need to learn to tolerate a level of risk that allows them to try, fail and try again. This is a learning cycle that applies to nearly every subject area and to every character-building life experience.

Most errors are approximations — he tries something and it’s nearly correct, but not quite. But sometimes a science experiment fails completely. It’s time to go back to the drawing board and make a new hypothesis. The important thing here is to learn from the failed experiment. That’s the key to accepting failures. Determine what has been learned from the experience. Set a new goal. Move on.

Here are some tips when walking with your child through failure:

  • Listen. Allow time to process what has happened and why.
  • Be ready to help analyze what went wrong. Talk it through.
  • Share anecdotes from your own life. We’ve all been there.
  • Make a new plan. Try a new activity, set a new goal, work harder next time.
  • Reinforce your absolute approval of your child as a much-loved person apart from any performance of any kind.

Lessons from Others Who Experienced Failure

There are many stories of great men and women of history who failed over and over again before achieving success. Abraham Lincoln lost political elections before succeeding in becoming President. Thomas Edison is famous for saying he didn’t fail when inventing the light bulb, he just found 10,000 ways that it didn’t work! Basketball icon Michael Jordan who said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, lost almost 300 games. I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot 26 times and missed. I’ve failed over and over again and that is why I succeed.” The key to success is never give up.

Parents are instrumental in helping their children learn the skills necessary to deal with the disappointments and failures we all experience in life. Choose the positive outlook that mistakes, errors and failures are just one part of learning any new skill. They’re just a link in the chain of achieving success. Your support and positive attitude toward this learning cycle will set the tone for your child’s future successes.

-Jan Pierce

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