Failure is a fact of life, but as a parent it can be a challenge to teach your children that failure is ok. Bouncing back from failure is also a teen milestone. Check out tips on how to bounce back from failure with help from the Center for Parent and Teen Communication.
Disclosure: This post is made possible with support from the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, part of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. All opinions are my own.
Facing Failure
Parenting is hard. I think every age and every stage comes at you with a new challenge. As parents our job is to teach and to love and some of those lessons can be hard ones. Recently our our preteen went through a tough learning experience facing failure.
Our son is a great kid. He is respectful, he follows rules and he is so sweet and loving. He is also stubborn, emotional and fearful of change. Recently he started competitive swimming and had his first meet. We were all excited, including him, but when that start signal hit, he froze and didn’t jump in the water to race.
He failed. We failed. It was rough. There were a lot of different variables that lead up to him freezing and facing failure, but ultimately it left everyone feeling hurt, frustrated and let down.
How to Bounce Back from Failure
Our initial response to our son appearing to give up and quit was not great. I have to admit that as parents we were quick to frustration and punishment. We were all so excited for this meet and to watch him do his thing and when he didn’t the reactions from everyone were rough. There is a long backstory as to why we reacted with frustration first but the bottom line is that we all had to learn how to bounce back from failure together.
Our son watched us fail in our parenting as he was dealing with his failure in swimming. We had to readdress him, to listen and to discuss where we went wrong while also listening to why he reacted as he did. He learned that it is ok to fail and that failure at a task doesn’t mean that you have failed as a person. Failure is a learning experience and the only way to learn is through risk and failure.
If you are looking for more information and tips on how to bounce back from failure or really anything to do with parenting teens, check out the Center for Parent & Teen Communication. They are an awesome resource that offers science-based strategies for families to form healthy relationships. They also have an amazing 100-word daily parenting newsletter that you can sign up for here.
