Can Our Child’s Failure Really Lead To Their Success?
Who would have thought that failure could actually be a positive thing? Sure, if we want to view failure through a ‘glass half empty‘ lense, it does feel quite negative. On the other hand, if we flip our outlook to a ‘glass half full‘ point of view, all of a sudden failure looks a whole lot better. If we can view failure with this positive lens we learn to see that failure is your child’s path to success. A way for our kids to learn how to pick themselves back up, learn life skills and discover how it feels to truly succeed.
Failure Is Your Child’s Path To Success
Failure is your child’s path to success. I know this sounds contradictory and doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but I am here to tell you that it makes perfect sense! Today my parenting tips are going to teach you how and why it’s so important we learn to let our kids fail. You will learn in this article that in order to help your kids succeed, you must first learn how to let them fail.
New World Parenting
Parenting today looks very different than it did years ago and because of this kids are being enabled more and succeeding less. Households used to typically have Dad working and Mom at home. Today’s world looks very different. Many homes have two working parents where kids attend daycare or before/after school care. Many families have nannies or extra help to make ends meet while both parents are busy at work. Typically, these caregivers want to please the parents and in doing so, avoid disciplining the children. This cycle of pleasing the parents and avoiding discipline leads to children losing their sense of ‘real life.’ Caretakers and parents are prone to doing everything for their kids often to ease the guilt of not being home. This guilt urges parents and caretakers to constantly ‘please’, creating a cyclical pattern of please, enable, and repeat.
Stop Constantly Pleasing Your Kids
This pattern of constantly pleasing forms out of love and it’s not purposely done to damage your kids, but the unfortunate thing for the children is that “having everything done for them,” manifests negatively within our kids. When parents become “helicopter parents”, and do everything for their kids, it teaches them self-entitlement, creates a lack of independence and robs them of opportunities to understand how to deal with hardships or struggles. They don’t learn strategies or tools to pick themselves back up when life pushes them down. They lack the skills of determination which encourages them to try and try again after they’ve failed.
Learn Life Skills
These skills that come along with failure are life skills you NEED your kids to learn. As parents, we need our kids to learn how to cope with hardships. We need our kids to learn how to improvise and use problem solving skills to work through obstacles. This will teach your kids that their choice of actions directly affects their life. If we constantly bail them out and give them a false sense of “real life” they will never be given the gift of these necessary life skills. We often think we are doing our kids a favour by pleasing them and keeping them happy at all times, but really we are doing the exact opposite. We are failing our kids by enabling them.
Set Boundaries, Limits & Consequences
When your kids make choices, have set consequences and follow through. This is the first step to letting them learn that failure leads to success.. Let your kids live with the choices they make. This is how they learn about real life. This is where you grant them life’s greatest gifts, self-reliance, independence and responsibility. What better gifts to have?
Real Life Lessons
Parents often get in the habit of bailing their kids out in order to avoid failure. When your kids forget to do their duties, don’t bail them out and do it for them. Learn to let your kids fail. Let them fail by forgetting their lunch money and succeed by remembering the next time. Let your kids fail by not washing the dirty soccer uniform when they didn’t put it in the hamper. Alternatively, let them succeed by wearing the uniform dirty and let him/her explain to their coach why they don’t have a clean uniform. These are real life lessons for lessons learned for life!
In conclusion, our kids must fail in order to succeed. This is your gift to your kids. Support them, set them up for success and then let them take charge of their life. Don’t do it for them, you will only be taking away their chance to truly and fully succeed! Empower your kids and let them fail!
For more information on helping teach your kids to learn from their mistakes and stop homework battles contact me for your one-hour consult!