Supporting Success in Young Children

Supporting Success in Young Children: The relationship between perfectionism, persistence & failure

Transcript

Kids Are Avoiding Hard Things

[00:00:00] All right, this is the second conversation I was referring to. Perfectionism, or more of why aren't kids taking risks? Why aren't they willing to persevere and keep going at things? What is going on that we have?

[00:00:18] Children who won't do things unless it's perfect on the first try, won't try things because everything seems too hard, too overwhelming, too, too, too. So I have an idea I want to share with you and I actually talked about it in a podcast quite a long time ago about, you know, the concept of how we say, be careful.

[00:00:42] And I recently talked on a podcast with Heather. Boyd about this, this idea of what's happening with Children in the early years, that's maybe not setting them up for the kind of success that we were kind of hoping it would. So here's the caveat, you know, I love a good caveat and I love to sort of put things out there so that we can remove some of the layers of guilt and shame and blame that we put upon ourselves, but here's one of the layers that we're going to talk about.

[00:01:11] And that is in our busy lives of parenting. We are one of the most present parents in history, right? So that's sort of given that we are very present with Children and there are some amazing things that have come out of that I also think there's some not so amazing things that have come out of that and one of the not so amazing things is Lack of independence, lack of autonomy, lack of self advocacy.

Adult Versus Kid Decision Making

[00:01:39] So, interestingly, one of the things we are hoping in our model of parenting is to be like, I want kids to be authentic, and I want them to be independent, and I want to really validate their beliefs, and their preferences, and their food likes, and their clothing choices, and all these things. Um, but one of the things we're not realizing in that is A, their brain development can't often handle the level of Adult decision making.

[00:02:05] I think a lot of adults, myself included, find the level of decision making required of us can lead to overwhelm at times. We are in sort of materialism overload. There are so many clothing choices, shoe choices, food choices, the choices, TV choices. Man, trying to pick a TV show? I don't know about you, but there can be days where I don't watch a lot of TV to be perfectly honest, but there are a day.

[00:02:30] Part of the reason is I avoid it because there's so many choices. I can never find a good one. And I feel like most of them are mediocre because we have so many choices, we're not doing a good job. Creating, um, solid shows. That's sort of my take, but again, there's so many music choices. Like if you think about the number of choices in the world, there are so, so many anyways, stepping back a little bit to take it back to the topic of perfectionism or willingness to take risks.

Kids Losing Skills in Busy World

[00:02:58] So one of the things that I noticed in the early years is as a part of our busy, busy lives. We do a lot of things for children that they should or could do for themselves. We do them because we're on a time crunch. We do them because we're not enjoying the big reactions to what's happening. And so we're trying to avoid our threshold, right?

[00:03:20] And some people will say, you need to pick your battles. And I think that's true, but I think we need to pick our battles more intentionally. So, in some cases, we're trying to get kids to do things that in less stressful circumstances, they're quite capable of doing. Putting their shoes on to get out the door or get dressed or whatever the case may be.

[00:03:39] And so we throw a time crunch on it, we add the layer of stress and suddenly getting out the door has become a layered nightmare, right? So there's that component, um, where kids aren't able to actually use their skill mastery because they aren't able to do the skill under pressure. It's not that they can't do the skill and then we as sort of caring adults are like, I know you can do this.

[00:04:03] What is your issue? Right? Well, think about yourself when you're under stress. Are you able to perform tasks the same way? Getting out the door is stress for a child and it's a level of stress that's maybe flipping them to complete dino brain. If you know my book, The Adventures of Team Brain, I teach brain science in a really playful way.

[00:04:23] But the idea here is that we, what makes us flip our brains is different for children, for teens, for adults. And so getting out the door, trying to put your shoes on when you are adamant about your desire to put your shoes on. In a stressful circumstance, that skill that you normally would have, maybe you don't have skill mastery to the degree that you can do it under pressure, under a time commitment.

[00:04:47] Right? So there's some different layers that come out that end up, everybody ends up being in dynamite and everybody ends up, you know, yelling, screaming, shutting down, running away. And as a result, we sometimes take over that task, right? We'll take it over. We'll be like, Hey, I just got to get you out the door.

[00:05:03] So I'm going to do it for you. Right? And one of these we have to do is step back and say, Hey, if I'm doing it for, are they building that skill? Right? And we have, if you talk to teachers, a lot of teachers will tell you kids who can't tie their shoes. Um, that skill is much more delayed than it used to be.

[00:05:19] So many layers there, but it is delayed for most kids, right? Where they used to be able to do it when they were younger, it's delayed now. And that's, again, because of our busy lifestyles, access to time. It takes time to learn how to tie your shoes. That is a time. It also takes perseverance. I'm going to use an example from my preschool.

Sitting with Difficulty is Hard

[00:05:39] and this may sit Difficultly. Difficultly? That's not a word. This may create some difficulty for some people. So one of the things that I had a rule about in my preschool is that I would not help children climb the climber. Now, I had a sort of general rule of thumb that I would be there to what's called spot them.

[00:06:02] That means if they were to fall while trying to climb the ladder and they were small, and that fall could be a, you know, problematic, I would spot them to make sure that they wouldn't have a hard fall. But generally, here's how this theory works. If you're not coordinated, if you don't have your fine motor, gross motor development skills in line with climbing the climber, you probably can't climb high enough that you could fall and that be dangerous for you.

[00:06:30] Right? So there's a theory in sort of outdoor education. Um, Bienenstock talks a lot about this, this idea that like you can't climb a tree higher than you can fall out of a tree. And We, there's lots of risks in this and I know some people right now, probably their blood pressure is like pumping because they're like, well, I don't want my child to fall out of a tree. I don't want them to fall off the climber. I don't want them to break anything. Um, part of childhood is also getting some bumps and bruises. Like, we can't protect kids from everything because there's some consequences of that. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today. Here's what I'm getting at. So I had that rule because a couple of different things.

[00:07:10] One, kids need to learn how to do things and persevere at them. And it needs to be age and developmentally appropriate. A climber is a perfect example. If we put a child who can't yet climb themselves onto a climber, we're actually taking away a really valuable life skill from them, we, we're not doing it on purpose.

Is Fun Preventing Failure?

[00:07:36] We're there to have a good time. We want to have fun. We are being present parents. We're taking them outdoors. We're going to the playground, all the things, but one of the unintentional consequences of over helping. is that they're not learning how to try and fail and get back and try again. Here's the other thing, in my preschool, for some kids, that learning trajectory was short.

[00:08:05] They would figure out, and it had different layers, there was different levels to the climber, so they could only get to certain places, and it really was in line with when their bodies were ready to do it, and I'm very, very cautious about saying there's a certain age or time frame on this, it's, it's not by three by five by whatever it's when you can do it yourself and when you can safely get up and get down without help. Right?

[00:08:33] So there's an interesting sort of component here to them having to work at it, but there's another thing and for some kids, that would be a quick trajectory. And for some kids, it would be a slow trajectory because you have to learn how to master skills on your timeline. And the life skill is learning that your timeline doesn't look like other people's timelines. And that's uncomfortable. That is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for parents to witness. It's uncomfortable for the child to feel. That discomfort is so important. Because if we don't learn how to navigate discomfort when we're little, what happens is as we get older, we can't handle it. We can't handle bigger discomforts because we haven't had good practice at the smaller discomforts.

[00:09:17] Right. So one of the things we have to think about when we're, you know, parenting and when we're supporting kids with things is how am I letting them sit with frustration, disappointment, guilt, jealousy, those very uncomfortable feelings. And where am I maybe fixing things that would be less helpful to fix, right?

[00:09:42] Maybe, if we're picking our battles, getting out the door requires my assistance because we legit need to get out the door and I don't have time for this learning trajectory. But if we're at the playground, the learning trajectory has no timeline. Right? Yes, a child might get frustrated trying to climb up to the slide.

Making Space for ALL the feelings

[00:10:01] Now, here's the thing that's really tricky, right? We want every outing to be happy and joyful. And so it's interesting because in the world, there's a lot of conversations about how important emotions are and how we really want to empower kids to embrace understanding emotions and, but we actually prevent them from feeling a lot of the really tricky emotions, which they're not getting good at handling.

[00:10:28] And as a result, when they get to places like preschool and school, they don't have a lot of skills. For dealing with their not as awesome feeling emotions. So how does this translate to something like trying something new and not being perfect the first time. How does this relate to? Perfectionism.

[00:10:49] Well, here's the thing when we remove obstacles from their development like climbing the to get to the slide and not getting the first time the second time or even for six months not getting it We that's where the encouragement comes from right? That's where it's like didn't get there today. I gotta try again we can play in the sandbox.

[00:11:13] We're gonna try I'm not gonna solve this problem for you. So you're building in This narrative of support around failure, because if you ask any body, I mean, Ed Sheeran's been talking about this a ton, Kobe Bryant, like all the big Serena Williams, um, they're all talking about how failure is what they learned the most from.

Failure is the trajectory for sucess

[00:11:36] Failure is actually what Traject was, their trajectory to success. And what I'm seeing in the early years is we barely let kids fail at anything because we don't like the uncomfortable feelings that come with failure. And we, we are unintentionally doing things with the goal of fun in mind that are overtaking really important life skills around perseverance around determination around trying to figure things out and again, it's not intentional. It's totally not intentional, but how it's playing out is when we get to kindergarten and beyond. Suddenly, we don't do it right the first time we want an adult to make that right for us because adults have been making things right for us for quite some time now.

[00:12:24] When something's a little bit too hard, we want an adult to make that less hard for us because adults have been making it less hard.

[00:12:32] And so one of the things that came up with my, in my conversation with Heather was, okay, how do we know what's developmentally appropriate? How do we know when to fix the too hard things, right?

[00:12:41] When do we know as an adult to step in? Here's what I generally say as a rule of thumb, when you're thinking about building skills with your child and when you're giving them choices or when you're exposing them to experiences, if you would say no to it. It's probably not a kid choice. It's probably an adult decision, right?

[00:13:02] So if you're, you know, giving two options from the fridge and they pick option three, that's an example of a choice that they can't handle, right? If it's something that impacts their health, well-being in safety, right? So again, we're going to use the playground. If we're putting a child on top of the climber and then we're afraid of them falling, they're not ready to be there.

[00:13:25] That's hard to sit with. That's hard to sit with. Because we want our kids to grow and develop quickly. But here's the thing. When they grow and develop on their timeline, they have mastery. And one of the things I saw in my preschool, some very cool things. One is when kids see each other trying to figure it out even very limited verbal kids will help each other try to figure it out together So some problem solving that happens interactive problem solving that happens, which is really really fascinating but also You learn to sit with disappointment and failure and get back and persevere because somebody else didn't do it for you.

Independent Pride

[00:14:05] There is not the same level of joy is not seen on a child's face when you put them up on the slide versus them getting there by themselves for the first time. And you've been sort of encouraging that momentum. Those kinds of pride and joy don't look the same at all. They don't look the same at all.

[00:14:22] When a kid gets there and they do it again. And there's also some real learning in doing it once and not being able to replicate it. Right, so if we're thinking about some of the trajectories on life, step back and think, hey, Where am I doing things with the goal of fun in mind? Usually the goal is fun.

[00:14:41] Again, don't do it on purpose. The goal is fun and connection. That's another conversation. We're going to have a conversation. That'll be my next topic. I think is the difference between presence and connection. Those are totally different things and what fun really means and how childhood experiences, not every outing, because we have this limited time that we spend with children.

[00:15:05] But we're still very present. We want that time to be fun and engaging. But truly, as your child's guide and mentor in life, there has to be a balance. And if one of the things you're finding tricky in your life is that you're navigating a world where you're kind of walking on eggshells, hoping for less reactions, hoping for not as many meltdowns as much, one of the things is, have I I unintentionally set up these situations where life is always fun, and I've avoided not getting skills for the ugh feelings.