HELPING CHILDREN COPE WITH FAILURE

National Network for Child Care's Connections Newsletter

Christine M. Todd, Ph.D.
Child Development Specialist
Human Development and Family Studies
University of Illinois Cooperative Extension

Copyright/Access Information


As I was testing bread recipes in preparation for writing an article on cooking activities with children, I made several mistakes. First, I tried using a bread dough recipe with honey in it. The result was a sticky mess that I could hardly knead. Frozen bread dough worked much better. I'm sure a traditional bread dough without the honey would also have been easier to manage.

Next, I tried rolling the dough into little balls to put on a cookie sheet. I thought bite-size pieces might be fun! I soon discovered, however, that it was hard to roll bread dough into balls. So I made breadstick shapes instead. My next mistake was to burn the bread sticks. Obviously breadsticks cook faster than loaves of bread. But I had forgotten to reduce the cooking time enough for the first batch.

As I was sitting there, happy to have tried things out before writing the article, I suddenly had a disturbing thought. What exactly do we teach children by providing them with activities that never fail? Would all my hard work leave them with the impression that adults never fail? Or, that an activity has only one goal - to make a perfect product? Or, that we should always try to avoid mistakes?

With this thought, I realized that in my attempt to provide well-planned activities, I was actually keeping children from a valuable learning experience - making a mistake. Mistakes are not inherently bad. Everyone has heard the example of Mr. Goodyear who tried to make rubber hundreds of times before he got it right. If Mr. Goodyear had let failure stop him, we might all be riding around in cars with metal wheels!

Similarly, research has shown that the children who are good in math are also those who tend to make more mistakes. These children are not stopped by failure. Rather, they continue to explore the problem and search for new solutions. Eventually, they are successful. As a math teacher once told a group of parents gathered to learn how to help their children, "No one ever learned anything by being right!"

One of our jobs as caregivers should be to help children distinguish between mistakes that are "ok" and those that are not. Acceptable mistakes are those that arise through experimentation and creativity, those that result from conditions beyond our control, or those arising from lack of knowledge. One of the most exciting times I had with my youngest son was when his third grade teacher encouraged him to "make up" recipes. I had my doubts when the recipe included 1 cup of salt, 1/2 cup of peanut butter, and 3 cups of flour. But we tried it anyway. It was pretty awful. We made faces as the salty taste hit us. Next, he decided to reduce the amount of the salt and increase the amount of peanut butter. That batch was decidedly better. We kept changing the proportions and adding new ingredients until we had developed a fairly decent peanut butter cookie. And the smile on his face when he had achieved this goal was wonderful!

Of course, children do have to learn to avoid mistakes under some conditions. When the outcome is very important, it is better to be careful. I wouldn't like to fly on an airplane whose pilot took a rather relaxed view of making mistakes during landings. And I definitely don't want my surgeon to make a mistake if he can help it! I also have little tolerance of individuals who routinely make mistakes out of laziness or carelessness. Sometimes, it is important not to make a mistake.

But most of the time mistakes are a fairly routine part of life. When children make mistakes we need to help them cope effectively. As children become more product-oriented around eight or nine years, they begin to develop the mental ability to evaluate their products against a standard. They may become very critical of their mistakes.

We can help children learn to have a more relaxed attitude about mistakes by:

• Laughing at ourselves when we make mistakes;
  
• Providing enough materials and supplies so children always feel they can start over if they make a mistake;
  
• Reacting calmly when mistakes do happen (e.g., "Oh, well. It didn't turn out. Too bad. We'll try it again sometime.");
  
• Helping children learn from their mistakes by focusing on what they could do next time to avoid the problem;
  
• Encouraging children to turn their mistakes into successes (e.g., change the odd-looking bird picture into a very colorful free-form design).

It is a terrible burden to feel you can never make a mistake. The next time your activity flops just relax and laugh. Realize that you have just changed the goal of the activity from "developing cooking skills" to "helping children cope with failure."