How to Encourage Your Child to Make Mistakes

Do you celebrate mistakes?

My son was washing the blender after making a smoothie. It’s an awkward shape and the sink was full of dishes, so as he went to flip it to rinse it he accidentally poured a quarter of a jug of dirty water all over the clean dishes on the rack, trickling down and inside the cupboard and all over the floor.

He looked up at me, searching for my reaction. My initial thoughts were, I have not got time to clean this up. I need to respond to client before we leave for an activity. As  I was about to yell something, I took 5 seconds to pause.

In those 5 seconds I gave myself the choice in how I wanted to respond. Choosing our response is one of the most important skills we can learn as parents because a child creates meaning based on how we respond.

My son replied, “oh snap!” and started cleaning it up and I began to help him by which time I had calmed myself down enough to say, “awesome buddy, what are you realising about rinsing out that big jug if the sink is full?”

In the future of work, being able to make mistakes and celebrating them is a critical skill for mental resilience. Why?

When we are sharing our creativity and our uniqueness, chances are it’s not going to come out perfectly on first go, probably not even on the 100th go, but each time your experiment fails, you learn something and have that knowledge for next time.

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. He said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”

Let’s not make mistakes just ok, let’s encourage and celebrate them. (Even when we feel like yelling!)