WEYBURN - Recently, I wrote about the importance of giving their children chores in the ‘Youth are our Future’ column, and how those chores can develop responsibilities and skills for our youth. A reader emailed me in appreciation of the column, noting it was ‘an affirmation for those parents who already raise their children this way, and a new way of thinking for others.
The reader encouraged me to write a column on how parents can turn a negative, or a failure, into a learning experience. After all, there are going to be moments in our lives when we cannot fix the problems, and it is important that our youth also learn from their parents how to accept those situations when they happen.
Everyone has failed at something in their life; it is part of the life experience. It is important that our youth are taught at a young age how to accept failure, and how to learn from their mistakes. The best way for any parent to showcase this attitude is to admit their own mistakes, and demonstrate ways they have learned from their failures.
We have to remember that innovation will be a key ability trait for our youth to have, as they start to look at entering the work field. Companies have to constantly innovate to thrive. It is very important that failure be viewed as one step of a long process of innovating, and finally achieving success. We have to learn through a process of trial and error.
Failure can be hard to talk about, but it is one of the ways we can learn what works, and when things don’t go our way, we can try to find something new. Let’s all go back to playing with building blocks – half the fun was letting the tower come crashing down, so we could jump into building something new.
To embrace failure, it is important to silence your inner critic, and not to dwell on what went wrong. Instead look to the lessons learned, and think positively about how to make your next approach. Consider that failure as valuable data, explore the mistakes, and try to identify the variables that led to the end result.
It is also important to value progress, as sometimes in life we will fail multiple times. It took me several times to ride a bicycle without training wheels, and several times to take my driving test before passing and acquiring my learner’s license. There are things I excelled in during school, and classes where I struggled, and it all led me down to the right career path of journalism.
We should consider failure as part of life’s experiences, and not feel bad about when it happens in our lives, and definitely as parents not try to protect our children from the experience either. Remember that the most successful people in the world have failed, and they can learn from it and move forward. We should all take that opportunity.
