Parent’s question
Failure is an important part of learning. It helps students learn their strengths and weaknesses and develop the skills to overcome them. But sometimes, children can start giving up after experiencing a cycle of failures at school. Even very bright children can become prone to beginning tasks very halfheartedly and giving up at the first sign of difficulty.
Psychiatrists call this “learned helplessness.” It can happen in the early grades because of emotional immaturity, low frustration level or over-dependency on adults. It also can happen when children start fourth or sixth grades because these are points when learning requires more effort, and some bright children have no strategies for handling difficult assignments and give up too quickly.
It’s not easy for these children to overcome the tendency to give up when the going gets tough, but they can with continued help from teachers and parents.
By modeling how to approach a problem and giving specific instructions at every step along the way, parents can help their children learn how to tackle difficult assignments. You can do this by teaching kids:
- Effective problem-solving strategies
- To look for more than one approach when solving a problem
- To retrace their steps to find errors
- To use self-talk as a guide for solving problems
Don’t forget, some very powerful people failed before becoming successful. Read about them – and why good parents let their kids fail.
