Is failure a good thing in school?

Failure is a Good ThingJune 27, 2021June 29, 2021

The world we live in is often competitive and our children feel the constant pressure to perform, do better and succeed. This is not always a good thing as it adversely affects a child’s mental wellbeing.

Is failure a good thing in school?

Some of our parents have written in to ask how we can help children deal with failure.

How can we help children when they fail or when things go wrong? How do you help motivate when children hate failure?

  1. Lead by example, promote a healthy attitude towards failure. We only learn when things are challenging.
  2. Share stories with children of failures that you have had in life and how you overcame it.
  3. Your children will copy your emotions, so how you react to a challenge makes a big difference.
  4. Do not praise the result, but applaud the journey.

How can we support children with emotions such as anger and aggression towards failure?

Anger is a natural and essential emotion. Children need to feel safe to express different emotions. They need to understand that they cannot act out in a way that harms others. Get them calm first before explaining. A few tips on how to manage anger are:

  • Breathing exercises.
  • The child needs to find a way to express that anger either through drawing, painting, or writing.
  • They need to be able to speak to an adult or a peer about what they are feeling. This will help them make sense of their emotions. By not expressing, they start hurting themselves.

When a child understands that it’s okay to fail, as it helps you learn, evolve and get better, the anger and aggression towards failure will also reduce.

How do we know if our children are resilient?

Resilience in learning is overcoming challenges. Children being able to cope with what life throws at them. This does not mean children should not feel emotions. The key factors are:

  • How often do they feel sad or angry
  • How empathic or emotive are they with children around them
  • How flexible are they with their thinking
  • How good are they with problem solving,
  • Do they reach out to adults for help
  • Do they establish positive relationships

How to boost a child’s confidence when he doubts himself? Some children tend to escape from the difficulty, instead of confronting it and solve/conquer the problem. How do you help them?

Recognise mistakes instead of erasing them. Being open to failure helps children realise that it is ok to fail, and also helps them learn from it.

Kids have shown great resilience through the pandemic and the changes that have come with it. How does the school and us parents highlight or inform them of this besides just saying “you’ve been resilient”?

Encouragement, praise and positive reinforcements of how children are doing, as opposed to the end-result will help children recognise that they are doing it right.

We hope this helped. Do send in your comments or questions if you need more information.

Telling children that it is perfectly normal to sometimes fail at school can actually help them do better academically, according to newly published research.

The results of three experiments by French researchers are not definitive but they are intuitive; kids who don’t feel overwhelming pressure to do well all the time are more likely to feel free to explore, take academic chances and not fall apart if they make a mistake.

The first experiment explains how the three were conducted: 111 sixth-graders were all given very difficult anagram problems. A sub-group of the students who were told that learning can be hard and that they should expect to sometimes fail did better on a test measuring working memory capacity than students in two other groups who did not have the same failure-is-okay discussion. Working memory capacity is said to be a good predictor of reading comprehension, problem solving and other aspects of academic achievement.

The findings are explained in article called “Improving Working Memory Efficiency by Reframing Metacognitive Interpretation of Task Difficulty,” by Frederique Autin and Jean-Claude Croizet of the University of Poitiers and the National Center for Scientific Research in Poitiers, France. The article was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by the American Psychological Association.

In a news release about the article, Autin was quoted as saying: “We focused on a widespread cultural belief that equates academic success with a high level of competence and failure with intellectual inferiority. By being obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material. Acknowledging that difficulty is a crucial part of learning could stop a vicious circle in which difficulty creates feelings of incompetence that in turn disrupts learning.”

And Croize was quoted as saying, “People usually believe that academic achievement simply reflects students’ inherent academic ability, which can be difficult to change. But teachers and parents may be able to help students succeed just by changing the way in which the material is presented.”

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Is failure a good thing in school?

Valerie Strauss Valerie Strauss is an education writer who authors The Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the LA Times. Follow

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Failure is a part of learning. While the idea of failing can seem scary, it helps students develop learning skills, boost their sense of determination, and build self-esteem. Failure is an opportunity to grow.

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When students are permitted to fail, they can nurture a better sense of who they can go to for help, what kind of help they need, and advocate for themselves as they learn who to trust. When students constantly succeed, they avoid asking for help and tend not to feel as comfortable reciprocating it.

Is being a failure good?

Failure is an opportunity. It's a chance to reevaluate and come back stronger with better reasoning. Failure is not fatal. No matter how hard it may be know that failure simply means you get another shot to try it all again.