Help Children Learn to Tolerate the Risk of Making Mistakes
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It is said that “If we don’t allow children to fail at times, we are setting them up for overwhelming distress from failure in the real world”. When you encourage thinking beyond single approaches and allow your children opportunities to make decisions, choices, and confront the mistakes that come with these transitions from the unknown, you give them the gift of flexible and creative thinking.
How does one decrease the fear of making mistakes?
🌟 Share motivating memories
🌟 Provide examples of people they admire who described their struggles with mistakes
🌟 Acknowledge your own mistakes.
When you make a mistake, acknowledge it to your children. Tell them about times when you were their age and felt very embarrassed or angry about your mistakes. Perhaps at times, your first instinct was to blame someone else or to try to hide your mistakes. Let them know if it was a struggle for you to acknowledge your mistakes and frustrating to spend more time to really understand something that was hard.
🌟 Encourage them to tell you about mistakes they have made in the past and how they felt and reacted. Ask them what they would do differently now when confronting similar issues.
Just as learning how to walk, speak, and read does not emerge fully proficient, the development of tolerance to setbacks is not a smooth pathway to perfection. When you increase their comfort by making mistakes, you’ll build their willingness to think out of the box and interpret information with wider perspectives. Help your children recognize that they’ll build confidence, problem-solving perseverance, and creativity by understanding that mistakes can be brain boosters.
Coach Benjamin Mizrahi. Educator. Learning Specialist. Family Coach. Father. Husband.
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