How To Prevent Your Child From Being Afraid Of Failure
Many children are afraid of failing because, at some point, something they have done has not gotten the result that they hoped for. It is important that parents help children to overcome this fear of failure. Life is a continuous learning, but without error this learning would not be possible .
Failures are not bad; the bad thing is the way in which we interpret that failure and the fear that it causes us to happen again. Failures allow us to learn little by little, while helping us mature psychologically and emotionally .
Why are children afraid of failing?
Fear of failure is not just common among children; there are many adults who also have this fear. This is so because, as children, they did not explain to them that failures or mistakes help them to learn and grow as people .
It is essential that from an early age we try to change the way in which children see failure, to get rid of the fears that sometimes paralyze them and prevent them from developing and advancing in their learning.
The fear of failure generates negative emotions in children , since they have made a wrong interpretation of their mistakes or failures. This fear can become your enemy for healthy and happy growth.
Negative thoughts associated with the fear of failure diminish children’s potential, this fear paralyzes them and makes them feel like failures and weak. This can make them unable to achieve certain things throughout their lives , although they have surplus qualities to do them.
Tips to help your child avoid the fear of failure
Avoiding failure or making mistakes in life is almost impossible. Throughout our lives we make mistakes and fail, but what we should not do is regret it, but learn. The time to teach children strategies and skills to learn to overcome failure is in infancy; we must do it since they are small.
It is important to instill in children an open and positive mind in the face of failure and make them see that it is something natural in life. Errors and failures are experiences that lead us to learn and we should not avoid them, but overcome them . We give you some tips to avoid fear of failure in children.
Teach them that mistakes are not bad
It is important that parents talk with our children to explain that failure is nothing negative and that we can get what we want if we go through mistakes and mistakes. These will help us to perfect the technique to achieve better results.
Give them examples of our failures that have helped us learn
We can give them examples of ourselves when we learned to do some things. For example, learning to ride a bicycle with two wheels (nobody or almost nobody learns to do it without ever falling). We must explain to them that nothing happens, we keep practicing until we learn and we stop falling. Therefore, failures (falls) have helped us learn to ride a bike .
Encourage children to participate in activities they are good at
Proposing activities that we know they are good at and that they like, will give them self-confidence . When they have to do other activities in which they are not so confident, they will be more capable of doing them, since they have learned to have self-confidence.
The result that they obtain in these activities is not the important thing; the important thing is to participate in them and have the opportunity to achieve success, based on your effort.
Teach them that experience is the best teacher
Another thing we must instill in them is that the best teacher is experience and practice. The more they practice and the more experiences they participate in, the better the things you do will turn out. When we have gone through some mistakes, things become easier because we already know where we have failed before. Repeating things over and over will help them to have greater self-confidence.
Encourage them
Parents have the role of guiding our children to eliminate the fear of failure from their minds. For this, it is important to encourage them in everything they do , not to be afraid of failure, because it will help them to continue learning. In this way, we will get our children’s self-esteem and motivation to grow.
Explain the importance of taking risks to achieve what they want
We must not forget to teach children that in life sometimes we have to take some risks in order to achieve our goals. These risks can go through making a mistake to, in this way, achieve what we want . When the little ones understand this, they will be able to believe in their possibilities.
From the fear of failure we can say …
Ultimately, we can say that the fear of failure is nothing more than a wrong interpretation that we make of an experience that did not turn out as we expected. We have to see error for what it is, an opportunity to learn and continue to grow as people . No one learns without making a single mistake.
This is the important thing: to instill in our children what failure really means or what we interpret as such. That fear of failure will only paralyze us and fail to reach our goals . We must not forget that there is no learning without failure, and we must not avoid it, but overcome it.
