Unison Parenting Blog: Build Resilience with How You Treat Mistakes

I knew one of our children would become resilient by watching them shoot a plastic basketball at a short basketball hoop in the backyard when they were three years old.

Over and over, the child missed the shot. While I watched from a distance for 20 minutes, the child never made a shot. I was thinking of helping or encouraging, but I simply watched and marveled at the lack of discouragement or frustration. Finally, the child made a shot, and I got excited with them. That didn't stop the game, though; they kept trying to get the ball through the hoop a second time.

To conclude this series of developing your child's emotional health, I want to briefly highlight one of the most important qualities they can possess: resiliency. Teaching your child to view mistakes as lessons rather than failures is one of the most important ways to develop resilience in them.

Guidepost Montessori, a global network of such schools, wrote, "Resilience is a byproduct of how failure is treated - as something to avoid, or as something to move through." If we try to rescue a child before or after they make a mistake, they never learn how to bounce back.

Guidepost Montessori offers five recommendations to build resilience:

• Let small failures happen without immediately stepping in to fix them.

• Focus on process feedback instead of outcome judgment. "What could you try differently next time?

• Normalize frustration as part of learning, not a signal to quit.

• Resist labeling mistakes as "good" or "bad," and treat them as neutral information.

• Give space for re-trying instead of rushing to move on.

In my book, Unison Parenting, I developed two models for growing your child’s decision-making capability. The models combine gradually increasing responsibility for making their own decisions with guardrails to protect the child. But within the guardrails, they are given latitude for making their own mistakes.

Resiliency can be your child’s lifelong advantage if you begin teaching them now.