Helping Kids to Persevere Despite Mistakes

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Many children have misunderstandings about mistakes. They may think that speed in understanding represents knowledge or that mistakes are a sign of lesser intelligence.

Mistakes are frustrating

As children start working to build skills they desire, such as solving early puzzles or making circles instead of scribbles, they often experience the frustration of not doing it "right." Even when we assure them that there is no right or wrong when starting out, or that with practice they'll get better and better, many still suffer distress.

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.” Going from the unknown to the known involves detours through uncertainty and mistakes. When you encourage thinking beyond single approaches and allow your children opportunities to make decisions, choices, and confront their mistakes, you help them build perseverance.

For many children in school, their greatest fear is to make a mis­take in front of the classmates and suffer a self-imposed humiliation. Let them know that all their classmates suffer the same fears. Help them understand that setbacks provide opportunities for them to revise their brains’ inaccurate memory circuits which, if uncorrected, could impede future understandings. Working through periods of confusion strengthens the correct durable networks their brains ultimately construct. Allowing children to make mistakes and correct them with a positive attitude builds their understanding and solidifies accurate learning connections.

Helping kids persevere through mistakes

Learning is a process of going from the unknown to the known. If your child’s school experiences are errorless and effortless, they are not likely learning new things. They may do well on tests, but the brain likes a challenge that is recognized as achievable.

Remind children of struggles they had with mistakes they made on the path to achieving goals they’ve accomplished. “Remember when you were learning to play soccer and you kept trying even though you felt like giving up? Remember when you struggled to play basic chords on the guitar and now you have mastered so many? Remember your first attempts to write and now it’s easy for you?” Help them recall that with effort and practice, they made fewer mistakes and enjoyed the pleasure of greater skills. Here are some more things to try:

• When helping them study, don’t avoid asking questions that are challenging for fear that they will be too frustrated to try.
• Extend your wait time – don’t give the answers to their questions before they have enough time to really consider the question and try possible answers.
• Expand their perseverance and understanding with questions that have more than one correct answer.
• After a correct answer, ask if there are any other possible solutions or answers.
• Ask questions where they need to explain their reasons and consider alternative or additional solutions.
• Tell your kids about some whopper mistakes you made that will make them laugh … and learn that life does go on after big mistakes.
• 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 confronting similar issues.
• Provide examples of people they admire who described their struggles with mistakes. Michael Jordan commented: “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Source: Judy Willis

Setting the stage for success

Invite discussions about the mistakes we all make when we impulsively respond without thoroughly considering the outcome. Discuss examples that may apply to them such as:

• Sending a text message or media posting without considering all possible outcomes.
• Deciding early in a movie or book that a character is the bad guy, then finding out more about the person and realizing that they jumped to their opinions too quickly. (Perhaps this has even happened in them in real life in judging people too quickly from appearances or initial interactions.
• Following along with the crowd or what friends do, without considering the possible negative outcomes.
• Making careless mistakes by starting the test or assignment before reading all the instructions.
• Rushing through reading and finding they don’t remember what they read.
• Choosing the first multiple-choice answer that seems right without looking at the other options that really included the most correct response.

Source: Judy Willis

Suggestions to help your kids learn from mistakes and use them for better future success

• Be a guide on the side. Instead of giving answers, encourage kids to analyze, predict, evaluate for possible solutions themselves.
• Remind them of what they already know about the topic and the skills they have developed that could guide them with the challenge.
• Recognize times when they made mistakes and took the time to think about them, learn from them, and did better the next time.
• Know some of the pitfalls to avoid. Ask teachers or friends, who took their class previously, what common misunderstandings or mistakes have been made involving the topic they are starting.
• Explain how learning from mistakes — understanding where they made the mistake — is powerful cement for the correct solutions/answers.
• When a test is returned, take the opportunity to find out the right answers so their eager brains will wire in the correct information for future use.
• What common types of mistakes do they make? If they frequently make the same type of mistake on certain types of tests or assignments, they can keep a list of these types of mistakes to be aware and plan how to avoid them in the future.
• Before starting a test or assignment, on which they are prone to making the same type of mistakes, they can write a few words (on scrap paper) to remind them of the mistakes to avoid; for example, “estimate to see if my answer is reasonable or read my writing quietly aloud to find errors before turning it in.”

Conclusion

Learning from their mistakes now will help your children evolve into adults who perceive problems as opportunities and persevere to exceed the status quo. As your children build mistake tolerance and tenacity through setbacks, they will recognize mistakes as opportunities that increase understanding and skills rather than indications of failure.

By building their power of perseverance through their inevitable setbacks, errors, and mistakes, your children will develop the blueprints needed to confidently take on and flourish through future challenges, solve new problems, and become creative innovators.