My daughter, like her father (insert eye roll), is one of those amazing, albeit sometimes annoying, people that everything seems to come easy for. She does great in school, excels in sports, and is pretty much good at anything she tries to do. Don’t get me wrong, I know we have been lucky to avoid some stresses that come with parenting – we haven’t had to spend hours struggling with homework or comfort tears of frustration over learning to ride a bike. (Shout out to the mamas that climb these mountains every day). But as she gets older, inevitably things will get harder. There will come a time when she won’t just be good at something…
Then it Got Hard
Enter the day something got hard. Enter frustration. Enter the shutdown. To put it mildly, she lost her mind. Her first fall in a gymnastics meet and she was ready to quit and hated the sport. For the first time in her life, things didn’t go her way and it was debilitating for her. All of a sudden her drive was gone. She had failed at something she truly cared about and couldn’t handle it.
She needs to know how to fail. She needs to learn how to work through something without getting frustrated. Some of the greatest athletes and greatest minds were failures. Michael Jordan did not make his the high school varsity basketball team on his first try. Bill Gates dropped out of college and had a failed data business before Microsoft. Stephen King’s manuscripts were rejected countless times. They all learned from their failures and did not let that identify them. I need to teach my kids to use failure as a step in the right direction. As a valuable stepping stone in the journey of learning and improving. Get over it and work harder, kid!
Embrace the Struggle
So, we embrace the struggle. I stopped telling her I’m proud of the 100% on her spelling test and I tell her I’m proud of the way she studied her words. I started making hard work at practice more important than winning awards at her meets. We celebrate growth instead of focusing on the end game. I find ways to use failure as motivation for her. I highlight my failures in an effort to lead by example. She’s not dumb, she knows that ultimately a good grade and winning are rewarded in our world but I can only hope I have instilled a value for the work too. So when the time comes that she fails, she knows its okay, she learns from it and she doesn’t lose her mind.
