If you are an Indian parent between 30 – 50 years of age and grew up in India for most part of your childhood, you would most likely understand the stigma attached to failing. If you scored lesser marks than expected of you in any of the subjects, it would most likely result in harsh scolding by parents making you fear ‘failure’ even more. And when you look back now you would certainly feel that much of it was un-necessary. We at ‘Glearnr’ feel otherwise.

We do believe that pushing kids towards clear outcomes and chastising failures may have been the right approach in the India of 1990s. India had only opened up its economy in 1991 and was still struggling as a country. Resources was still a challenge and opportunities for employment were too few and almost all of them in government enterprises. In such a backdrop it does make a sincere parent worry for a kids’ future resulting in chastisement in the face of perceived failures. The scolding was our parents’ way of saying, “We had it really tough, if you want to do well in life you should make success a habit”.

Fast forward 30 years, a lot of economic and technological context has changed. More people are employed in private sector than public. However, the future continues to remain uncertain as ever. We wrote more about it here. But often our way of parenting is pivoted to the way our parents taught us (party due to respect and partly due to habit) and we continue to view ‘failures’ as critically as our parents did.

We don’t believe that this is correct. First, failure is not always bad. In life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. Second, learning from failures is anything but straightforward. The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. However, there are a few ways one can teach a child to effectively navigate through setback and failure in life:

Need to create psychological safety: Every child learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame. This creates a fear of acknowledging failure in its full and ends up creating self loathing at times. As kids become adults they continue to hang on to this feeling of self-blame. Therefore, it is important that from an early age parents inculcate a sense of psychological safety amongst kids to help them overcome the negativities around failing

Focus on process and not on outcome: Henry Thoreau famously said that success usually comes to those who are too busy looking for it. This probably sums up how kids should be taught to focus more on the process than attach themselves to the output. If you are busy working towards success, you should eventually get it, but if your entire being is hinged on an outcome, it will most likely create disappointment.

Importance of compounding of small steps: Sometimes the biggest reason for failure is the desire to reach the end goal as quickly as possible. In kids, this impatience can quickly lead to disappointment and self rejection. Therefore it is important for parents to teach kids the importance of small steps and a daily regime. We have added a chart below that highlights the significance of small incremental gains. Graphs shows daily improvements of 0%,0.25%, 0.5% and 1% in any habit. At the end of 1 year (365 days) 1% daily improvement is 36x times the habit where there is 0% improvement.