How can you guide your child through setbacks and mistakes without solving their troubles for them? Middle school principals Lauren Mehrbach and Chris Beingessner offer some tips to help your child start building that tolerance for discomfort and failure.
Making mistakes is a part of life and though undesirable, mistakes actually help us learn and grow. As parents and educators, our aim is to “grow adults” who can navigate life’s ups and downs and manage the discomfort of mistakes. In order to do this, we need to allow our students to make mistakes and experience failure in a safe environment, with us coaching them. If we don’t allow them to live with natural consequences and experience adversity or discomfort when they are young, they will not have the skills needed to deal with these situations when they are older. Some researchers talk about it as “building tolerance for discomfort, an emotional callous if you will.” (Abraham and Cordner) We experience discomfort all the time as adults—delayed flights, rejection by a partner, being passed over for a promotion. We’ve all read numerous tales of university freshmen who crumble when they have their first setback with no parent there to intervene on their behalf. In order to help your child start building that tolerance for discomfort and failure, here are 10 mistakes that you should allow your middle schooler to make. These will help them build resiliency, gain confidence in their capability, and learn that they can survive even those “big mistakes.” 1. Let them get a bad grade. Most kids don’t like how this feels. As parents, if we force them to study, check their work, and over-edit their writing, we aren’t letting them see what they can do on their own. Inevitably, they will come up against an academic situation where their regular study and learning strategies don’t lead to an excellent grade. If we interfere too much, they won’t know how to manage when they don’t do well. 2. Let them forget their musical instrument, PE uniform, homework. When we bail our children out when they forget something, they aren’t incentivized to set up systems to ensure they have everything they need for school. What we are inadvertently teaching them is that they can’t manage without a parent “saving them.” 3. Let them run out of money on their lunch card. Teaching our children financial literacy starts with being aware of the cost of items, having a budget, and managing the money one has to spend. Students are often unaware of the cost of items in the cafeteria, let alone the amount of money left on their card. Give your child a budget for lunches, and make them stick to it. They can always pack a lunch from home (not you pack it!) if they run out of money or decide to buy their friends some frozen yogurt.
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