Help Your Children Make Mistakes - Foster Resilience in Your Child

Teaching our children life skills will help them develop the trait of resilience. One important life skill is learning to manage the mistakes and errors we make. Often parents are fearful of allowing their children to move forward in life and make mistakes. We want to protect them. However, children who are not allowed to make mistakes can become fearful of making the smallest decisions, may be hesitant to solve problems and try new experiences. We want to promote resilience in our children. Resilient children can make mistakes, get up brush themselves off and move on.

There are 3 simple ways we can teach our children the right attitude about mistakes:

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1. Encourage inventiveness:

My son rides his bike to his counselor job. He complained that his backpack kept on banging against the wheel of his bike. It was driving him crazy. He took an old backpack and tried to refashion the straps so that his bag wouldn't hang down so low and reach the wheels of his bike. He was using a scissor. It just seemed to me as I was watching him that he was ruining this backpack. I kept my mouth shut. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he came to the same conclusion. "I think I made it worse."

Instead of berating him for his attempt, I knew that this was the perfect opportunity to applaud his efforts in trying to find a solution to his problem. I said, "I am glad you tried. You know it took Thomas Edison over 1,000 attempts to make the light bulb. I am also glad that you used an old back pack and not your new one."

This is the kind of response that promotes resilience in our children. We can teach children that little failures are opportunities for growth and that effort should be celebrated.

2. Get children involved in understanding the values of mistakes:

Use your children's blunders and missteps as an occasion for teaching them the intrinsic value of mistakes. My other son knocked on and broke the outer glass on our back door (which unbeknownst should have been replaced when we moved into our house because it did not meet safety standards- our bad). I checked to see that he wasn't hurt which he wasn't. Instead of yelling at him for being irresponsible, I tried to gently encourage him to think of something he learned from this mishap. I said, "Well, we definitely learnt something from this, maybe that we should never knock on any door that looks like glass? What do you think?"

It can also be helpful to share what you have learned from the situation. Later on I said to my son, " What I learnt from this whole thing is that if we ever buy a new house the first thing we will do is make sure that any glass looking doors are made from tempered glass or plastic!"

3. Tell stories of failures that were really successes:
Many successful people relate that their mistakes and failures were valuable lessons. Their difficult and oftentimes painful experiences shaped their future in powerful ways. This is the attitude we should adopt even about our little mistakes. Collect stories about failures that were the impetus for great achievements and share them with your children. I asked my son for some stories that he knows about a successes that started out as a mistake. He told me there was something about Alexander Graham Bell but he couldn't remember it exactly. We looked online and found the following:

Bell enjoyed the work of the German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz. and read his book written in German. In his book, Von Helmholtz stated that, vowel sounds could be produced using electrical tuning forks and resonators. Bell could not read German very well so he thought that Von Helmholtz had said that vowel sounds could be transmitted over wire. This misunderstanding changed the world. Alexander Graham Bell said, "It gave me confidence. If I had been able to read German, I might never have begun my experiments in electricity."
Our family loves these kinds of stories and we try to refer to them laughingly when we make mistakes.

Making mistakes is not something to be feared. It is a part of everyday life. Teaching our children to deal with their errors will encourage them to be resilient and strong. It creates a "can do" feeling that they will use and value their whole lives.

Help Your Children Make Mistakes - Foster Resilience in Your Child

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