Hi. Welcome to this week's mindset session. I want to discuss with you an essential and sometimes humbling topic that you can demonstrate to your child: the value of making mistakes.
When children are afraid of making mistakes, it can cause significant problems in their learning process. For example, they might:
- Stop trying altogether
- Avoid difficult tasks
- Refuse to engage in learning activities
- Or even try to hide their mistakes
These are all really human responses to being afraid of not getting something right.
And so, you can help them develop a different attitude, a different mindset toward mistakes: a positive one, a growth mindset. This mindset actually helps them grow, rather than holding them back. You can do that by modeling a few key principles.
How to teach kids that learning is about the journey, not the right answer
One of those principles is developing your child's exploratory learning mentality by modeling it yourself. Demonstrating that learning is not about getting the correct answer. When we focus on the goal, we can become so overly focused on that final answer and whether it's correct or incorrect.
If that becomes the sole focus, rather than emphasizing the process and exploration of a topic, and guiding your child to see the bigger picture, it sets a poor foundation.
It's essential to appreciate and acknowledge the experience of learning and the process, rather than being overly focused on a single answer and whether it's right or wrong.
So that's one thing to keep in mind about ourselves. All of this comes from ourselves and our own mentality. It's really, really hard to encourage this mindset in your child if you don't have it yourself. And so, the focus should be primarily on your own mentality towards it and then demonstrating and transferring that to your child.
How to show your child that mistakes help them learn
Another is showing your child how mistakes can actually be helpful because they eliminate one of the incorrect answers.
For instance, putting together a puzzle can sometimes be frustrating for young children. They try a piece in a particular place, and it doesn't work, which can be super frustrating. But by using that as an example to show them that, well, that eliminates that puzzle piece as a choice. And so, now we can set that aside, which is actually really helpful because we can go through and eventually eliminate all the incorrect choices to find the correct one.
So, showing them that trying something and it being incorrect can be a really beneficial thing. This is how scientists work, too, so you can also use that. You can tell them when your child is attempting something and it doesn't work that time, and then they need to revisit it and try something else.
They're actually thinking like a scientist. That's what scientists do.
Using the scientific method, they will experiment with things and test their hypothesis or their guess to see if it's correct. And if it's incorrect, they continue to try something else to discover the answer to their question.
Model making mistakes: Why your child needs to see you mess up
This is where it can be humbling. You need to be honest about your own struggles and your own mistakes. If a child never sees our mistakes and how we handle them, it can be very difficult for them to develop a positive attitude or strategies for dealing with their own.
So being honest and open about the things that are difficult for you, mistakes that you've made, whether in the present right in front of your child, or things that you struggled with when you were in school, is really helpful to your child.
Just to know that this is something that happens to everybody. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has to come back and figure out how they will tackle that.
You can talk to them about what those mistakes taught you and how you overcame them, and just model that positivity to your child.
Make mistakes fun: Turn challenges into detective games
Staying positive about your child's mistakes is just as important, if not more important. Help them search. You can turn this into a game. It's like a detective game. Okay, this didn't work, this wasn't the correct answer, or we weren't successful doing it this way. We didn't get the answer that we were looking for. So we're going to be detectives, and detectives have to search in all kinds of places and try over and over again sometimes. So, we will be detectives searching for the correct answer.
And what that does is reframes it into the process. It's not about that final destination so much as it's about the process of looking for the solution to something.
So, it reframes it into a bigger picture and helps them see learning as a process rather than being overly results-oriented.
Give your child tools to handle frustration and keep trying
So
- by being honest about our own struggles and mistakes,
- being positive about our child's mistakes,
- and just helping them to see learning, growing, and acquiring new skills and knowledge as a process rather than as a results-oriented type of situation,
Then, it helps to develop a growth mindset, and it helps to keep them open to engaging with the learning process, even when it's challenging and they're not quite sure what to do next. Or when they're frustrated with themselves, you help them by giving your child tools to overcome that and to push beyond it.
So I hope you get an opportunity to incorporate a couple of these things this week and focus on your own mindset toward it because, again, that's where our children's mindsets primarily come from, is how we approach these things. And I hope this has been helpful. I'll see you next week.