Mandie Shean
Protecting children from failure isn’t helpful. Better to build their resilience
In recent years there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical — failure is unpleasant. It tends to make them look bad, and have negative feelings of disappointment and frustration. And often they have to start again.
While this is logical, it actually has the opposite effect. Children and adolescents in Australia appear less able to cope than ever before.
The problem is, that in our efforts to protect children, we take valuable learning opportunities away from them. Failure offers benefits that cannot be gained any other way. Failure is a gift disguised as bad experience. Failure is not the a
bsence of success, but experience of failure on the road to success.
Gift of coping
When we fail, we experience negative emotions such as disappointment and frustration. When children are protected from these experiences they can believe they are powerless and have no control over mastery.The answer is not to avoid failure, but to learn how to cope with small failures.
Low-level challenges have been called “steeling events”. Protecting children from these events is more likely to increase their vulnerability than promote resilience. When adults prevent failure so children do not have to experience it, the latter become more vulnerable to future experiences of failure.
Gift of understanding natural consequences
One of the greatest gifts failure brings is we learn natural consequences of our decisions. It’s a very simple concept developed by early behaviourists: “when I do X, Y happens”. If I don’t study, I will fail; if I don’t practise, I might lose my place in the team.
Allowing children to experience these outcomes teaches them the power of their decisions.
When parents and teachers derail this process by protecting children from failure, they stand in the way of natural consequences. Studies show children who are protected from failure are depressed and become less satisfied with life in adulthood.
Gift of learning
Mistakes are the essence of learning. As we have new experiences and develop competence, it’s inevitable we make mistakes. If failure is construed as a sign of incompetence and something to be avoided (rather than a normal experience), children will start to avoid challenges necessary for learning.
Failure is only a gift if children view it as an opportunity rather than threat. This depends on their mindset.
Children with a growth mindset believe intelligence is malleable and can be changed with effort. Those with a fixed mindset believe they were born with a maximum level of intelligence. Therefore, failure is a signal for growth mindset children to try harder or differently. But for children with a fixed mindset it’s a sign they aren’t smart enough.
Praise should focus on effort
Praise can be used to compensate and encourage children when they experience failure. We see this when children get a participation ribbon for coming last in a running race.
But paradoxically, research indicates inflated praise has the opposite effect. In a study, when parents gave inflated praise (“incredibly” good work) and person-focused praise (such as “you’re beautiful”, “you’re smart” or “you’re special”), children’s self-esteem decreased.
Praise that is person-focused results in children avoiding challenging tasks to maintain acceptance and self-worth. This is because praise is conditional on “who they are” rather than their efforts.
Praise for effort sounds like “you worked hard”. This is better because children can control how hard they work, but they can’t control how smart or special they are. Children need to be free to learn without there being a risk to their sense of worth.
Tips for parents
So how do we do this well? Here are some tips to help parents support their children:
- Don’t protect children from low-risk natural consequences. For example, if they don’t study and fail an assessment don’t defend them, let them deal with the
consequences at school. - Use experiences of failure as a chance to grow and learn. Talk through the experience and work out what to do differently next time.
- Remind your child that negative emotions come with failure and that’s okay. They should experience them and move on to do things differently in future.
- Give genuine praise for effort (“you tried hard”, “great perseverance”,) but don’t feel the need to
give inflated untrue praise when children haven’t actually done anything praiseworthy.
Protecting your child from failure isn’t actually helpful. Allow them to experience and live it, and let them have the gifts failure brings. Experiencing failure will make them more resilient and more likely to succeed in future.
(Mandie Sheen is lecturer, School of Education, Edith Cowan University, Australia)
(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license)
