How to teach them to accept their failures?
Before Christmas arrives, we have to overcome an important annual procedure: the arrival of the school's grades. And they are not always good, sometimes they are darn bad or, at least, worse than they could have been. So the occasion is painted bald and we can take advantage of teach them to accept their failures. We can not imagine the great favor that we will be doing if we manage it well.
Why? Because we have a generation of "not resilient" children. The 'word', 'resilience', has become so fashionable that it seems that one has studies in pedagogy or psychology if he is able to link it three times in a conversation. The concept is much simpler than the term. It means that we have to educate our children with the ability to adapt to frustration and get over it. Come on, strong guys who face adversity.
But we are dedicated to doing children 'flojitos', tender, weeping, that sink into misery when something goes wrong and they get desperate and twist when something goes wrong because of them. Unable to accept things as they are. Unable to make the effort to change them for the better.
The problem comes from far away, from a time when the idea that if we generated frustration processes in children triumphed, they would be marked for life. And they sold us the ass that if we shouted in a firm tone: "It's okay, that's not done", maybe they ended up frustrated and turned into a serial killer. And the last thing parents wanted was to be guilty of having generated a serial killer. It is evident that not even Freud is able to relate an accurate domestic amendment with a clearly irrational behavior. But it sounded good and we believed it.
So where we had been given firewood -in the literal or figurative sense of the term- and every suspense brought home had been a real drama accompanied by exemplary punishment for life, now the parents are dedicated to justify the unjustifiable. We do it in all fields, but with the notes it is a horror. Because there is no more sadly objective finding that there is a problem with the child than a negative report card. And we can say mass, but the problem is with the child.
But the loving parents arrive 'antifrustration' and light the dreaded machine of justifications: seemingly plausible arguments that remove all possible weight to the role of the child in suspense.
Here, with a bomb-proof rhetoric, there is practically everything: that if you have too many duties, that you would need to send more for home; that if the school is excessively rigid, that if it lacks discipline; that if the child arrives exhausted and can not study, that if he has excess energy and can not concentrate; that if there is no way out of so many extracurricular activities, if there is a lack of leisure time; that if the parents are on top, if they should pay more attention.
As if that were not enough, they attack the system, which seems to be always to blame for what they have not justified with the previous story: this system is not for him, he has other multiple intelligences that must be discovered -what damage this excuse has made * -, the teacher has mania - as if the teacher had time to have mania to someone - and other similar.
There is no doubt that there will be more than one factor in the hot suspense fresh out of the evaluation meetings, but let us not be fooled, in general, the bulk of the 'fault' lies with the child and we will make his life infinitely better if we manage to transfer him these two ideas: they have done wrong and they can do it well.
When we justify them, we do not realize the terrible hidden message we are instilling in them: "No matter what you do, your effort is worthless, you can not get it unless the others put it on a platter. It's almost better if you do not try. " Is that really the teaching we want to give them? If we want to avoid their true frustration and guarantee their self-esteem, the best we can do is to tell them: "You have suspended, you and nobody else. Work, you and nobody else. "
