Positive words from parents, teachers, and mentors during difficult learning challenges is essential for children’s growth and development. All children need encouragement to learn and succeed. Learning from mistakes and failures isn’t easy. Help kids look at the good side of getting things wrong! (Get the infographic at the end of this article!)Įncouraging Your Child When Mistakes Happen.
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Mentor your child on how to apologize when their mistakes have hurt others.Praise children for their efforts and courage to overcome setbacks.Praise children for their ability to admit their mistakes.Avoid pointing out your child’s past mistakes.Encourage children to take responsibility for their mistakes and not blame others.Provide examples of your own mistakes, the consequences, and how you learned from them.Don’t rescue kids from their mistakes.Let them know your love is unconditional, regardless of their mistakes or lapses in judgment.Acknowledge that you don’t expect them to be perfect.Ten Ways to Help Children & Teens Learn from Mistakes It is an opportunity to develop a child’s resilience, one of eight core abilities in The Compass Advantage. Praise should focus on developing their character strengths, helping them understand their internal abilities. Giving meaningful and specific praise motivates children who are learning from mistakes. Intelligence testing for the kids praised for their effort increased by 30% while the kids praised for their intelligence dropped by 20%. The kids praised for being smart became discouraged and saw their mistakes as a sign of failure. The students who had been praised for their effort worked very hard, even though they made a lot of mistakes. When the 5 th graders were challenged with an extremely difficult test designed for 8 th graders, a surprising result occurred. One group was praised for their intelligence while the other group was praised for their effort. She and her colleagues followed hundreds of 5th-grade children in New York City schools. Her research shows that praising children for their intelligence can actually make them less likely to persist in the face of challenge.
Learning from Mistakes Improves Effort & MotivationĬarol Dweck, a professor at Stanford, studies the importance of challenging children to learn from mistakes. In fact, studies have found that learning from mistakes enhances rather than detracts from learning. However, recent research shows this to be an incorrect assumption. This approach to learning assumes that if students are allowed to make mistakes, they will not learn the correct information. And if they are lucky, they will remember the answer on a standardized test. For example, if we drill children over and over again with the same math problem, they will eventually remember the answer. Historically, educators have created conditions for learning that do not encourage errors. In the Scientific American article, Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn, research makes the case for more challenging tests that force kids to make errors. Throughout a lifetime, learning from mistakes helps develop wisdom and good judgment. It motivates us to try new, innovative approaches to problem-solving. Learning from mistakes is part of how we challenge ourselves to learn to do things differently. Whether it involves homework, developing friendships, or playing a sport, learning is enriched through error.
How does all this focus on testing and perfection affect kids’ learning? And how can we help them understand that learning from mistakes is part of healthy development? Why is it Important to Learn from Mistakes? They argue with teachers who try to point out a child’s areas of weakness that need improvement. Parents correct or complete children’s homework to improve their grades. Many children grow up in a society that pressures them to be perfect – to get the highest SAT scores, to land prized scholarships, to get into the best universities. Yet, we have failed to teach our children that there is a positive side to getting things wrong. Learning from mistakes and errors is an important part of child and adolescent development.