Reframing Failure
It can be easy sometimes as parents, carers and grandparents to be entirely focused on our young people’s successes. These are often the things we bring up at family gatherings or BBQs with friends when sharing about the young people we deeply love. Even in personal interactions with young people we can focus more on their wins and achievements, than we do on their failures. While the celebration of success is essential for self-esteem and growth, so is acknowledging and navigating failure.
As parents and carers, we have a range of responses to young people’s failure. Some of these are offered with the best of intentions to try and balance out our young person’s expression of their failure. We can choose to:
- Avoid it - brushing it off as nothing much in a hope we save their self-esteem.
- Overreact - blame, causing guilt or shame hoping that the disappointment will show them they need to improve.
- Deflect it - blame someone or something else to take out our frustrations and save them from theirs.
- Help them Learn from it - allowing them to sit with failure and coach them to take their learnings as they step out of failure with some new and helpful thinking.
Our young people are in formation, this means they are reliant on us to model the way and when needed mentor them through a failure experience.
International speaker Glen Gerreyn believes that:
“Failure can be a powerful learning tool!”
As parents and carers, while we want to agree, we sometimes can’t bear the thought of our young person sitting with such discomfort, we sail in to rescue, inadvertently setting them up for an inability to cope with failure in the future. We do this despite knowing that the last thing we want is for our children unable to navigate the inevitable road bumps of adult life.
If you think about babies, it’s through trying and failing and finding a new way to approach the task that they learn to crawl, walk, climb and run. Learning to walk, like learning to ride a bike or catch a ball takes knowledge, practice and a series of failures in order to achieve success. It builds resilience as a critical life skill that equips young people for future success.
How do we help our young people to ‘bounce back’ from failure? Modelling a growth mindset as an adult is a great first step, here is my take on the work of Glen Gerreyn to help you:
There is no doubt that everyone experiences failure, but it’s how you use failure to fuel self-improvement that inevitably brings future success.
God Bless.
Nicole Gregory | Principal
