Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

failure. It shows children what they did wrong so they can correct the problem in their subsequent efforts. Failure connects children’s actions with consequences, and that connection helps them gain ownership of their efforts. Failure teaches important life skills, such as commitment, patience, determination, decision making, and problem solving. It helps children respond positively to the frustration and disappointment that they will often experience as they pursue their goals. Failure teaches children humility and appreciation for the opportunities that they’re given.
    Of course, too much failure will discourage children. Opportunities to successfully demonstrate competence and experience success are also needed for their ability to bolster motivation, build confidence, reinforce effort, and increase enjoyment. As children pursue their life goals, they must experience a healthy balance of success and failure to gain a deep sense of competence.
Reframe Failure
     
    To protect your children from the destructive messages of failure, you need to communicate healthy messages about the meaning of failure. You should define failure in ways that encourage children to value rather than fear it and that will actually encourage their sense of competence by giving them control over it so they can avoid it in the future. For example, when children experience a failure in their lives, such as a bad grade on a test or poor performance in a sports competition, they personalize it as an attack on their value as people. That reaction can be truly hurtful and damaging to them. And it can be further reinforced by a strong reaction of disappointment, frustration, and perhaps even anger on your part.
    Your reactions to your children’s failings (and even your own) send powerful messages about failure that can relieve your children of feelings of guilt and shame and make failing an inevitable and healthy part of their lives. You can convey these messages through role modeling, responding to your own failures with calm andaplomb. You can also be supportive and encouraging when you see your children “fail,” for example, when they spill their milk at the dinner table, fall down while walking, struggle with a puzzle, or do poorly on a test in school.
    You can also help your children to reframe failure not as a judgment on their competence or their worthiness as people, but as information and a lesson to be learned. The information might be that they didn’t prepare well enough or they made some poor decisions in how they used their time. The lesson that they can learn is how to prevent that failure in the future by doing something different the next time they are faced with the situation.
    When you communicate positive messages of failure, your children gain an understanding of failure that liberates them from fear of failure. It also frees them to strive for competence without reservation, to explore, take risks, and vigorously discover their competencies. Children will know in their hearts that some failure is okay and is in no way a negative reflection on themselves as people. This early and frequent messaging will lay the foundation for healthy attitudes toward failure that will serve them well when they get to the age when “results matter.”
DEVELOPING COMPETENCE
     
    In recent years, our parenting culture began to send the message that competence is important for building self-esteem and that parents need to do everything they can to convince their children of how competent they were. All very reasonable, to be sure. However, that same parenting culture made a big mistake by telling parents that the way to instill competence in their children was to
tell the children
how competent they were. Parents bought into this message and started telling their children how smart and talented and wonderful they were. But here’s the problem: Children can’t be convinced that they are competent.
    When parents try to convince their children of how competent they are, they often have the exact opposite effect. There is this little thing called reality that children have to confront on a daily basis; life has a way of sending messages about competence that can be in sharp contrast to the outsized messages of competence that parents send their children. When children are faced with the conflict between what their parents have told them about how good they are and what reality is telling them, the result is the bursting of the “you are