Last year, I watched my youngest daughter fall on her face on a stage in an auditorium filled with people while attempting to land her backflip. At the time, her success rate was about 25%. My instinct was to stop this from happening until I realized that if she’s not afraid to fail at something, then who am I to stop her?

As a parent, I’m so proud of her fall because it truly symbolizes her fearless personality, something I think many of us could use a little more of, myself absolutely included. Plus, how are you ever going to get good at something if you don’t take chances and allow yourself to fall?

If success is measured by how many times one can bounce back from failure, then we need to build the skills necessary to tolerate distress in our lives. We need to teach children early that failure is a certainty when learning.

Ways to Help Your Children Embrace Failure

Praise the effort, not the outcome: Praise your child for working hard and avoid making it about the score or performance. Giving praise for the “A” or winning the game can feed perfectionism or make someone feel like their identity is fused to the outcome. It can take a lot of time to undo this way of thinking.

Feel the feelings and don’t try to change them: Embarrassment, sadness, disappointment, frustration, and shame are just a few of the emotions that can come up with failure. Embrace all the feelings. Research from a 2017 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making suggests that thinking about your emotions, rather than the failure itself, is most helpful. Feelings provide information and can motivate positive change moving forward. Focus on these feelings and sit with them.

When a child says they feel frustrated or embarrassed after a failure, don’t swoop in and tell them “no, it wasn’t that bad” or tell them not to feel that way. You can remind them how brave they were to try and let them know it’s okay to feel bad after a failure.

The balancing act of this step is sitting with the feelings, but not sitting too long. You can feel the feelings and still engage in values-based activities.

Self-compassion: We all need self-compassion to cope with harder feelings. “I’m human, and I’m going to fail at times.” Parents can model this mindset.

Normalize failure: Parents need to start normalizing failure at a young age. Point out your own failures, talk about the link between failure and learning, and talk about it as a certainty in life, not something to be avoided. Parents, how would your life be different if failure had been normalized for you as a child? You often regret the chances you didn’t take.

The big picture: Once you have sat with your emotions, think about how failure fits into the bigger picture of what you want to do. How can you learn from failure? While nobody wants to fail, you can survive it.

Research famous failures: In one of our counseling rooms, we have a quote on the wall from Michael Jordan where he says, “I’ve failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.” We need to highlight what successful people go through to get there. Kids are often amazed to learn how hard people have fallen on their way to greatness.

Adopt a mantra: I tell myself and kids all the time, “Just keep going, just keep going, just keep going.” If you work hard and don’t give up, there has to be some progress. Find your mantra and repeat it until it becomes automatic.

Parents need to fail: A huge part of being able to teach children to fail is being able to accept it ourselves as parents. If you struggle with this, that’s okay. You can learn and work on developing these skills alongside your child. Professional help is available if needed.

Accepting and normalizing failure is a huge part of our counseling program at ALC. We practice the skills necessary to cope with failure on a weekly basis, including building frustration and distress tolerance, losing, identifying and sitting with emotions, communicating feelings, self-compassion, goal and motivation identification, positive self-talk, coping with emotions, and awareness of values, to name a few. We aim to create new learning in the brain through the ongoing practice of these skills.

If you or your child is struggling with failure and it’s impacting daily functioning, the new year is a great time to start working on yourself. My daughter is a great example of how much you can accomplish without the fear of failing, and this is why she achieves excellence in her life, multiple falls and big feelings included! So, let’s fail our way through 2026 and come out better than we started! We’ve got this, even when we don’t. 😉