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How to Teach Children to Handle Failure

Many children are afraid of failure. And parents are always hoping for the best for their children and would not wish that they fail. However, children will not succeed all the time. In fact, they will fail more often than they will realize. As the old adage goes, we learn more from failure than from success. In this regard, parents must teach their children to handle failure since they will learn a lot from it than they would from success.

Here are some tips on how parents can teach their children to handle failure:

Appreciate Child’s efforts

Manage your Child's Failure by Appreciating your child's little efforts
Manage your Child’s Failure by Appreciating your child’s little efforts

When a child puts a real effort into doing something, thank them even if the outcome is not what they expected. Children will come to learn that there is honor in trying their best.

Therefore, they will be ready to try next time since they will not be bogged down by the initial failure.

As a Parent, Help Manage your Child’s Expectations

Child failure
Manage your Child’s Expectations

As a parent, do not place too much hope on the child since this will only give them pressure to succeed. Failing under these circumstances would be devastating mentally since they will know that they disappointed their parents. While parents should have expectations for their children, they should give room for failure so that the children will not feel overly disappointed if they fail.

Read also: 10 Important Teaching Tips for New Teachers.

Manage Your Reactions

Manage Child's failure by managing your reactions.
Manage Child’s failure by managing your reactions.

Parents need to highlight mistakes when they see one. However, yelling at the children will be counterproductive. Parents should instead be diplomatic by teaching the children what they should have done. This way, they would have learned from their failures.

Stop comparing your Child or Student to others

How to manage your Child's failure by Avoiding Comparison with Others.
Manage your Child’s failure by Avoiding Comparison with Other Children.

Children develop at different rates. Therefore, the worst thing parents could do is to compare their children with others after failure since this will only make them more disappointed. Instead, let the children know that they are competing with no one but themselves. Encourage them to work on their capabilities. Praise them when they accomplish a task even after several tries.

Let them Play

Manage your Child's Failure by Allowing your Child to Play.
Manage your Child’s Failure by Allowing your Child to Play.

Games are fun activities in which a child can learn to handle failure. The chances of failing and succeeding while playing games are identical in most cases. Therefore, by playing games, they will win as much as they will lose. These experiences will be translated to other spheres of life since they will understand that they will win the next time even if they fail at the moment.

Give them Manageable Tasks

Manage your Child's Failure by Giving your Child Manageable Tasks
Manage your Child’s Failure by Giving your Child Manageable Tasks.

While it is good to give children challenging tasks, do not assign them tasks that are beyond their capacity. Doing so will only be setting them for failure. However, if you give them manageable tasks and they fail, you could use it as a lesson for how they can sue their capabilities the next time. In this way, they will learn from the failure.

1 Comment
  1. Fred says

    Excellent information.

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