Eight Setbacks That Can Make a Child a Success

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Education (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Failure's are key to growth - If we expect too much or too little from our kids, we are setting them up to fail (in a bad way). We need to give them the freedom to fail and succeed on their own, to learn and grow from it, because it is much better now when failures are still manageable, and you are still here to support them. To help them with failures use the contain, resolve, evolve method:
   1. Contain - Make sure the crisis isn't spreading
   2. Resolve - Help them solve the problem at hand
   3. Evolve - Help them grow stronger from it

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? More resilient, successful teens that can face failures

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The examples in the book are less helpful than the writer believes they are, while they do cover most of the book. The contain resolve evolve seems partially unhelpful in some of the cases, and the q&a section seems unrelated to this method (although the subtext does share a common theme)

🖼️Outline

## 📒 Notes

Introduction

We grown ups have an easier time than children dealing with failure, because we have:

1. more freedom - we can choose which challenges to face and how
2. more perspective - we know that most failures are not that bad

And yet we still avoid it whenever we can, or try to mask it to protect our image Image vs core. Our children on the other hand are facing failure every day without a way out, and since they don't know how to deal with it, even small things can be a big deal.

We are responsible for teaching them how to deal with failures, and it starts with:

1. Acceptance - validation, to put judgment aside and accept them as they are.
2. See it as an opportunity for growth - failures are good, each provides a lesson on how and where we should grow Obstacles as stepping stones

To effectively help them grow, we should use the contain, resolve, evolve model.

The common types of failures and attitudes we might face:

1. The rebel - failure to follow the rules
2. The daredevil - failure to take care of themselves
3. The misfit - failure to perform well in school
4. The ego - failure to show concern for others
5. The loner - failure to connect with peers
6. The sensitive one - failure to handle their feelings
7. The black sheep - failure to get along with their family
8. The bench warmer - failure to believe in oneself

Introduction

• Our kids, on the other hand, face being terrible at things all day, every day. (Location 77)
• For kids to learn from their failures, they must trust adults enough to stop hiding them from us. And for that to happen, adults must stop judging kids (Location 87)
• Screwing up is nothing to be ashamed of; however, failing to deal with our failures in ways that help us learn and grow has bad consequences. (Location 102)
• Failure isn’t the worst thing that can happen to your kids. Often, it’s one of the best. (Location 155)
• Your response to your child’s failure can be the difference between your child getting stuck in failure and your child using that experience to push back onto the road toward success. (Location 183)

Getting Comfortable with Failure

Understanding Failure and how it Functions

When parents expect too much of their children, they are not pushing them to rise up, but rather burn down expectations Depression.

However, over protection is also problematic Moderation. Failure is the only way to grow, so Dont Jump to the Rescue. Also, we can't be naive, we can't stop our kids from experiencing failure, so better to use early failures when they're still small and manageable Simulations. Experiencing failures without proper mindset or the support we parents can provide will only cause them to learn helplessness. The only positive outcome from failure is if we manage to turn it into a positive experience.

We need to let go of perfectionism, they will surely fail or do it badly on their first attempts first batch trash, but if we don't allow them to do it badly, they won't reach the point where they do it well. Similarly, of course we want to protect our children, but in most cases safety is hardly at risk when we let them fail, most failures are not that dangerous or irreversible.

Understanding Failure and How It Functions

• Success, as I see it, has less to do with a young person meeting measurable, enviable outcomes and more to do with a child becoming personally fulfilled, developing competency in an area of interest, and finding a community in which to participate. (Location 278)
• Setting benchmarks for success just beyond our adolescents’ reach doesn’t encourage them to pull harder. It causes them to sink. (Location 308)
• Your delicate children need exposure to adversity, too, to become stronger. Consider opportunities to acclimatize to failure an essential way to help kids grow into healthy, stable, and resilient adults. (Location 362)
• No one can raise a child to avoid failure in life. (Location 387)
• only one thing can overcome our predisposition to giving up in the face of pain: a positive experience. (Location 435)
• rescuing your child from a tough situation or manipulating a situation to help them avoid getting hurt doesn’t serve your child best. (Location 438)
• Don’t allow your urges to keep your child safe—even if that need is also grounded in your morality—to override their need to experience a life of exciting, if scary, challenges. (Location 526)
• Fixing problems, overcoming embarrassment, developing coping skills—these things take practice. When we deny kids the opportunity to have bad feelings and practice working through them, we set them up to be incapable, insufferable adults. (Location 538)
• if you never let them do it badly, they wouldn’t learn how to do it well. (Location 549)

How Communities Benefit from Letting Children Fail

Our family and community benefits from having capable, responsible adults as it's members. In many societies to prove such capability involved a rite of passage, a proof of adulthood. This often required the child to do something difficult on their own. Only by themselves they will be able to learn something new and become better for it.

How Communities Benefit from Letting Children Fail

• a real test contains the opportunity for failure. If parents don’t embrace this stage of growing up, they deny their kids the access to the last two stages where they become better versions of themselves and are celebrated for it. (Location 722)
• to grow up, your child needs to (1) pull away emotionally or physically, (2) go through a hard situation by themselves (mostly), (3) figure out what they can learn from this experience, and (4) rejoin the community a better, more grown-up version of themselves. (Location 736)

Keeping Children Safe as They Take More Risks

Kids have a tendency to take risks, but this tendency is indifferent to where those risks are taken. Therefore it would be much preferable if they would be done in your home with your guidance if needed, instead of letting them ve by themselves out there where the failures and risks are much greater. Therefore the worst thing we can do is to Micro-Management, the "not under my roof" policy will only push them to do it somewhere else, where you couldn't help them. Its important to let your kids freedom and privacy.

Think of this as your kids bill of rights:

1. Make mistakes and have opportunities to fix them - if we don't show them that making mistakes is normal, they will be ashamed and hide those.
2. Maintain some privacy - privacy is essential for them to test out new behaviors while they figure who they are
3. Take risks - no risk, no growth
4. Choose their friends - let them have a social circle,without judgment
5. Practice making decisions - develop a sense of agency and authenticity
6. Have the benefit of the doubt - they are not trying to be jerks, even if it is expressed this way. Don't judge or be compassionate
7. Negotiate and self advocate - the more equal sit they have at the table, the more they learn to communicate and cooperate with others in a healthy way
8. Determine their own values - it's okay for them to have different values from yours
9. Access to information - asking is never a bad thing, and discrediting sources of information is hurting diversity
10. Seek independence - they create their own lives when given the chance, otherwise they wither away. We should give them opportunities for independence

Keeping Children Safe as They Take More Risks

• If we are going to embrace the reality that becoming a good adult doesn’t begin at the age at which a child leaves the parental home, but instead happens incrementally throughout adolescence, then we have to be deliberate about giving young people opportunities to practice. (Location 828)
• If we don’t teach kids that mistakes are a necessary part of life, teens will hide their mistakes because they don’t know how to handle the complicated emotions that come with them. (Location 875)

Preparing Yourself for What's ahead

When our child appears in crisis or when we think they are having a problem, we need to do two things:

1. Relax our mind and body - we can't let stress take over us, so first we have to calm our mind and body. Do meditation, take a walk or a bath, whatever you need
2. Resist your instincts - while they seem helpful, most often our instincts on what should be the best reaction are wrong Gut Feeling, we should take a close look on the child's circumference, emotional state, and remember that they don't necessarily need saving

Preparing Yourself for What’s Ahead

• Don’t confuse your worries with their problems. Observe how your child is actually doing, not what you suppose could be a problem. (Location 1074)

Three Steps to Overcoming Failure

To resolve a crisis, use this method:

1. Contain - to make sure the crisis isn't spreading, to reduce the risk (without immediately solving the problem). This could include:
   1. controlling the narrative - who knows what, who do we tell
   2. affirming our kid - letting them know we still love them no matter what
   3. reducing their exposure - from people, technology, places, depending on the problem
   4. gathering truth - getting helpful advice
2. Resolve - to solve the problem at hand
   1. Take action - depending on the problem, this could be an apology, a change in perspective, limitations and rewards, rebuilding trust
   2. Update communication - let those who need to know about the new arrangements
   3. Engage the network - get support from people with similar experience
3. Evolve - to learn from the failure and be better next time
   1. Give time and space - let your kid enough space and time to process the situation on their own
   2. Triage your fears - explore your inner fears and define them
   3. Face a fear - do something to reduce a fear
   4. Uphold the child's rights - give them a chance to evolve
   5. Establish bonuses for good behavior - do in the form of "if you... Then..." With time intervals to see whether the good behavior is maintained
   6. Gain new perspective - see the world differently through the new experience

Eight Archetypes of Failure

Failure to Follow the Rules

When kids develop from child to teen, they start to see the world from black and white to shades of gray. This moral grayness along with the desire for independence and figuring out who they were, can cause tension with family, society and general rules.

We prefer them arguing about rules rather than breaking them in secret. As long as lines of communication are open, a resolution and understanding can be reached, while breaking in secrecy is a breach of trust.

Remember that even if they break the rules, they don't necessarily want to harm, just be accepted by their peers.

Failure to Follow the Rules: The Rebel

• Seeking acceptance from their peers is a way for teens to tether themselves to community and establish that even though they are becoming independent, they don’t have to be alone. (Location 1382)
• Parents can help kids build maturity in this area by acknowledging intention—“I know you didn’t mean to”—and then redirecting to what could be done to avoid this in the future and what can be done now to make amends. (Location 1512)

Failure to Take Care of Their Body

We can't protect our kids from everything, they will get hurt (emotionally and physically). So how they got hurt, why and how bad are all relevant questions. While grounding them after an incident could be helpful, make sure to make it short otherwise they will get hurt socially. Remember to include bonuses, other freedoms and validation of your care. Usually getting hurt physically is a salient message to the kids themselves to not repeat this behavior, but if it is repeated consider asking for professional help.

Failure to Preform well in School

School is hard, especially if we have learning disabilities. Sometimes it takes time for them to be discovered. Also kids start juggling between social and academic life which isn't simple at all. Remember that the important thing is for the child to flourish by their standards, not the absolute cold values of grades. To find their interests, their own benchmark.

Failure to Show Concern for Others

Adolescence is a stage where the search for independence and personal identity can cause them to be less mindful and respectful of others. We might need to be more explicit with our rules and expectations, while also removing any judgment or grudge. It's a difficult time, but they will grow out of it eventually.

Failure to Connect with Peers

Adolescence is a time when friendships are formed and abandoned. It's a social exploration as well as internal one. That means that it's likely for them to go through some time alone, or seeing long lasting friendships end. We can't force our kids to be social, and it won't be helpful anyway. The best we can do is to be a good listener, to spend quality time together if we think they feel alone.

Failure to Connect with Peers: The Loner

• even the ones who seem to be surrounded by others can feel alone in a crowd if they don’t feel completely understood. (Location 2573)

Failure to Handle Their Feelings

Usually a depressed teen can't back away from what's making him sad. Even though it hurts them, they maintain the toxic connection. We have to be the ones who sever this connection, even if it causes them to resist. Other than that, we must embrace, accept them without judgment, while also approaching an expert if we feel it might be dangerous for them.

Also, we should remember that there's a difference between us not being able to cope with how they feel, to them not being able to.

Failure to Get along with Their Families

Remember that teens are experiencing a huge power gap between you as parents and them. They want to be independent, but are still very limited in the choices they can make. Even when it's hard, even when they are insulting and causing conflicts, remember to validate who they are, show interest, and maintain their freedom. Criticism will only backfire and cause them to shut down and not grow. Be patient and compassionate, even when "you are right".

Failure to Get Along with Their Family: The Black Sheep

• The adolescent brain perceives criticism as a threat. In response, it shuts down neurons and synapses used to grow. When your child perceives feedback as criticism, they can’t learn and grow from it in the way you hope. (Location 3285)

Failure to Believe in Oneself

Confidence and talent are the result of practice Practice beats talent experience knowledge. Giving them inspirational speeches does nothing for their self esteem. Encourage them to practice more, to understand what is in their power to change acceptance and focus on that, and let go of any stress related to things they cannot change.

We can't force our kids to believe in themselves, but we can encourage them to try.

Failure to Believe in Oneself: The Benchwarmer

• Experience—not listening to speeches or watching other people have success—breeds tenacity and success. (Location 3527)