Failure is a Good Thing

The world we live in is often competitive and our children feel the constant pressure to perform, do better and succeed. This is not always a good thing as it adversely affects a child’s mental wellbeing.

Some of our parents have written in to ask how we can help children deal with failure.

How can we help children when they fail or when things go wrong? How do you help motivate when children hate failure?

1. Lead by example, promote a healthy attitude towards failure. We only learn when things are challenging.
2. Share stories with children of failures that you have had in life and how you overcame it.
3. Your children will copy your emotions, so how you react to a challenge makes a big difference.
4. Do not praise the result, but applaud the journey.

How can we support children with emotions such as anger and aggression towards failure?

Anger is a natural and essential emotion. Children need to feel safe to express different emotions. They need to understand that they cannot act out in a way that harms others. Get them calm first before explaining. A few tips on how to manage anger are:

• Breathing exercises.
• The child needs to find a way to express that anger either through drawing, painting, or writing.
• They need to be able to speak to an adult or a peer about what they are feeling. This will help them make sense of their emotions. By not expressing, they start hurting themselves.

When a child understands that it’s okay to fail, as it helps you learn, evolve and get better, the anger and aggression towards failure will also reduce.

How do we know if our children are resilient?

Resilience in learning is overcoming challenges. Children being able to cope with what life throws at them. This does not mean children should not feel emotions. The key factors are:

• How often do they feel sad or angry
• How empathic or emotive are they with children around them
• How flexible are they with their thinking
• How good are they with problem solving,
• Do they reach out to adults for help
• Do they establish positive relationships

How to boost a child’s confidence when he doubts himself? Some children tend to escape from the difficulty, instead of confronting it and solve/conquer the problem. How do you help them?

Recognise mistakes instead of erasing them. Being open to failure helps children realise that it is ok to fail, and also helps them learn from it.

Kids have shown great resilience through the pandemic and the changes that have come with it. How does the school and us parents highlight or inform them of this besides just saying “you’ve been resilient”?

Encouragement, praise and positive reinforcements of how children are doing, as opposed to the end-result will help children recognise that they are doing it right.

We hope this helped. Do send in your comments or questions if you need more information.