This video is the 4th in a series about fostering academic success from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. It covers:

• Why relieving kids’ pain also takes away their power
• The single biggest predictor of success in college — and how you can foster it

Parenting Practice: Celebrating Mistakes

Here is what we need to teach our kids:

(1) They have the power within them to recover from mistakes.
(2) Mistakes are not something we need to hold onto and feel bad about forever. Embarrassment (or fear) is only temporary. Feeling bad does not help us learn and grow.
(3) Sometimes we learn things from our mistakes that we couldn’t have learned any other way.

To teach kids these three things, we aren’t just going to let our kids make mistakes, we are going to celebrate them! How? Take turns telling about something you did recently that could be considered a mistake:

• How did you feel while you were making the mistake?
• How do you feel now?
• What did you learn?
• What would you do differently next time?
• What good came out of the mistake?
• See if you can tell about your embarrassing moment, or mistake, like you are telling a joke. If you play this game at dinner, why not toast your mistakes and all you learn from them? To the mistakes we all make, thank you for the learning, may I someday laugh at myself!

“The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested―and your personal growth realized.”

–Katie Couric

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If you would like to download the audio version of this video to listen to in your car or on the go, click the link below.
DOWNLOAD THE AUDIO VERSION HERE.

 

This video is the 4th in a series about fostering academic success from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. Watch the rest of the videos here.