Raising a kid who can face life’s crests and troughs with resilience is a tall order. The going gets especially tough when the child has to deal with challenges, mistakes, or failures. How do you prepare the kids to handle such adverse situations gracefully without being too self-critical and having the guts and positivity not to give up and try again? Given below are some steps that can help you raise a resilient child with a ‘never give up’ mentality.

Let Your Kid Fail

Parents should let their kids fail and commit mistakes sometimes. If you rush to rescue them at every instance, it’ll impair their ability to understand their action’s consequences, learn crucial coping skills, and succeed on their own.

Failure teaches your kids important life lessons and helps develop the necessary skills that make them more resilient and determined to try again.

Brainstorm Solutions

After a failure, help your child come up with some solutions. Instead of spoon-feeding him, let him walk through the problem-solving process with some help from you. Encourage him to assess what went wrong and how he could avoid committing the same mistakes in the future.

Working with your child this way will reinforce his belief that failures aren’t a reason to quit. He’ll understand the need to re-evaluate the situation to create better approaches or plans that he can employ the next time. Thus, failure will be a learning process that lets the kid succeed eventually. 

Seek Your Kid’s Advice 

When his kids undergo setbacks, Adam Grant – an organizational psychologist, seeks their advice. This is an effective ploy that lets your child accept failures and mistakes as a standard part of life and allows them to develop an attitude of never quitting. If the kid faces a similar issue down the line, you can jog his memory of the outstanding advice he gave you. 

Help Develop a Growth Mindset By Praising Your Kid’s Effort 

Carol Dweck – Stanford University’s psychologist, led the research on “growth mindset.”

Kids (or adults) with a “growth mindset” believe they can learn and develop intelligence, new skills, and talents with practice and effort. These kids take up challenges believing they’ll finally succeed if they continue trying. In contrast, kids with a “fixed mindset” consider traits like intelligence innate and fixed. When faced with challenges, they give up easily, believing they have reached the edge of their capacity or intelligence and there’s no point trying.

To let your child have a growth mindset, you should praise the kid’s strategies, efforts, and processes instead of simply praising characteristics (such as intelligence). 

Final Words

To raise a kid who never quits, you should let him fail. Then, you should work with him to help find a solution after re-evaluating the situation. Seek advice to boost his morale when he experiences setbacks and praise his efforts to encourage a growth mindset. 

Using the steps above, you can raise a resilient kid who deals with life’s adverse situations with a positive, ‘never give up’ attitude.