Helping your child learn how to overcome obstacles
This is a collaborative post.
Helping your child learn how to overcome obstacles is important. Life isn’t all plain sailing and things inevitably go wrong. Your child will face many challenges, both during their childhood and in adulthood, so knowing how to face them head-on is an important skill they need to learn.
It’s not just about coping with difficulties though – if we can in fact embrace the learning opportunities they present it’s more likely we’ll reach our goals and achieve our dreams. Here’s some advice from an independent school in Wales on how you can teach your child to overcome obstacles.
Promote independence
Teaching your child to act and make decisions independently will set them up well for the future. Left to their own devices, children find out what they’re capable of.
If you always step in when you see them struggling with something or try to over-protect them (which is understandable) they’ll never learn their true abilities.
Let your child work things out for themself as much as possible and resist the urge to rescue them – solving a problem on their own will boost their self-esteem and confidence in tackling future hurdles.
Model resilience
Being resilient will make it more likely your child can face challenges and bounce back from disappointment. You can teach this by demonstrating it yourself in your everyday life.
Make sure your child sees you facing difficulties head-on rather than hiding from them, and use your problem-solving skills to brainstorm solutions. Try to maintain a positive attitude to any obstacles that come up and practise solving problems with your child so they learn to adopt the same mindset.
It also helps to look for the silver lining in any situation and practise gratitude for all the good things in life. This will help your child keep a sense of perspective when things don’t go their way.
Encourage small risks
As parents, we’re often wary about our children taking risks that could harm them, either physically or mentally; however, if we prevent or discourage them from taking any risk whatsoever we deprive them of the chance to learn what they’re capable of and develop autonomy.
The best tactic is to help your child learn to take micro risks, such as talking to someone they never had before at a party or putting their hand up in class if they don’t normally. Stepping outside of their comfort zone regularly will teach your child that most things aren’t as scary as they seem and, whatever happens, they can handle it.
