Freedom to Fail and Interact with Challenge in Confidence: Part 2 of How To Help Your Child Step Into The Best Version Of Who They Can Be (Neuro Tip)

A powerful way to set your child up with tools to become the best version of themself they can be is to help them create brain pathways that automate confidence and hope even among setback, failure, and challenges.

We help our kids create these pathways by allowing them to fail in a safe environment AND to experience the consequences of the actions (good and bad). We help our kids develop resilience and ability to handle challenges by not bailing them out every time they struggle or make a mistake. When we always bail a child out, we are sending the message, "I don't believe you can handle this, so let me come in and save you." On the flip side, when we sit back and allow them to work through a challenge and even handle the results of failure and messing up we send the message, "I believe you can handle this. I know you will learn and grow. I trust you. I believe you can work through challenges and not be crushed by them."

When a child never has a chance to fail, they do not get the opportunity to develop a healthy method of handling the results of failure and how to get up and keep going. Also, when a child witnesses you going to great efforts to protect them from failure it can create apathy because there is a disconnect between actions and results or it can create a fear of failure because it's so bad that they must be protected from it at all costs.

When a child knows it’s OK if they fail they will be more confident to take risks. When a child knows how to handle failure and take it in stride and keep going they are free to try new things and pursue dreams that are beyond their current ability right now.

As an adult, your child will be faced with all sorts of challenges without you present to help them. If they get to those challenges and they are afraid of failure, they will most likely either avoid the situation or handle it with extreme stress and anxiety. However, if your child has built confidence and brain pathways and experience handling challenging situations, including failing and dealing with the consequences, they are more equipped to tackle challenging situations in a healthier manner with confidence and calm.

Remember: we cannot protect our kids from every trial and challenging situation in life, but we CAN prepare them with tools to handle the trials and challenging situations.

While the natural instinct for a parent can be to try to bail a child out and keep them from any type of discomfort or uncomfortable consequences, by doing so we rob our child of the powerful opportunity to deal with those emotions and thoughts while we are present to help guide, model, and encourage them.

Allowing our children to interact with failure will look different at different stages in life. It will also look different based on what age you started allowing them to interact with failure. It is important to understand that our children will not know how to interact with failure, unless they have seen it modeled in a healthy way and have created brain pathways to interact with failure in a positive way. We can model it through our actions and we can help them build pathways by talking about it in a positive light. We can help them see failure is a growth opportunity, not something to be avoided. We can focus on the character and development we see in them instead of the outcomes. This goes for competitions, grades, and other things that have a man given rating on it. We can direct our focus to the process and the character to help our children see the result is not what matters. We can help them understand we love them because we love them and that getting first place or accomplishing a task does not make our love meter go up or down. 

Giving your children opportunities to interact with failure while modeling stress and fear of others will lead to your child developing pathways that automate stress and fear of others. We dig deep into "Fear of Others" in LAUNCH. When a teenager can understand how the brain works and choose to guide their brain to automate freedom from fear of others, they can be unlocked to reach their full potential and to do so with emotional stability and peace.