A child’s career is always on top priority for the parents, while he/she is growing up. The schooling, studies, personality development, hobby classes, all circle around what path their child is going to choose once they’re an adult.
It is very normal for parents to spend a lot of their time, money, and energy on helping their child choose his career, from a very young age. Unfortunately, this sometimes puts a lot of performance pressure on the kid, that ends up in fear of failure or an inability to handle career setbacks, however minor or life-changing.
Parents often are unable to teach their kids how to embrace failure and strive for success together. They spend most of their time encouraging their kids to do better in school, or competitions and forget to impart that losing is a part of winning.
The children grow to become more and more determined to be successful when they see their parents invest so much in their careers. So any hurdles on the way sometimes make them lose motivation and purpose.
Tricks For You to Help Your Child Embrace Career Setbacks:
1. Developing a Growth Mindset
When your child makes a mistake or encounters career setbacks in life, the best way to help him get through it is to show them the plus side of failing. Showing your child that growth is guaranteed from the failure of success, teaches them that without failure there is no success in life.
This philosophy gives them a positive approach to negative results and helps them in fighting failure rather than fearing it. It teaches them to see the positive side in everything, thus making their minds and perspective grow from each mistake.
2. Don’t Protect Your Child from Failure
It’s a natural parental tendency to protect their offspring from any sort of hurt, sadness, that are the possible consequences of setbacks.
Parents try to hide all kinds of negativities from their children, but that has its own outcomes, which are often detrimental for the kid in the long run.
Since you can’t protect your children forever, they are bound to face failure at some point in their lives. So if they are not equipped at handling it from formative ages, they might not be able to handle it when they are older.
Encourage your child to work for their passion and give them an open space to grow, learn, fail and succeed. Guiding them, giving them constant support, and helping instead of dominating their every decision, is the best way to help them cope with the stress of life and career setbacks.
Also Read: How to Encourage Your Child to Work for Their Passion?
3. Explaining to Them Where They Went Wrong
Another way to help your child cope with career setbacks or any other kind of failure is to be open to them about their mistakes. By helping them acknowledge their mistake, and guiding them through the maze of “what went wrong” you can make them reflect on their past actions. It is a great way to give them perspective, help them evolve into thinking adults, and avoid making these mistakes again.
Reflecting on one’s actions also helps in overcoming career setbacks, personal problems, and stressful circumstances.
Parents are often afraid to point out their child’s mistakes because they might break his confidence or self-esteem.
This might not happen if you don’t shout, ridicule, taunt or compare them with other children.
Understand your child’s career aspirations and be the light in their journey instead. You can do this by gently dealing with their mistakes and by making them see what they are doing wrong, you’re actually giving them more confidence in themselves.
Also Read: How Will You Understand Your Child’s Career Aspirations?
4. Celebrate Failure
This might sound absurd to many, but celebrating participation and failure makes you work even harder to achieve success. Celebrating career setbacks is a way to embrace your situation and welcome a fresh start, a new chapter in life.
Brooding over your child’s career setbacks and failures will just make him/her feel like he has done something wrong, and that will make him/her close his/her mind to any new opportunities that may come his/her way.
If you celebrate your children’s mistakes, it will positively affect them into looking at their mistakes constructively and working harder than before towards their goals instead of wasting their emotions, and energy over just feeling bad or angry about themselves.
5. Make Your Child Feel that failure is Normal
When children face failures, they think that they are the only ones who are wrong in the whole world. This leads to loneliness and isolation.
They often feel that everyone is going on the right path, but it’s only them making mistakes. Failure sometimes makes the children feel left out, which later becomes common learning for them that if they face setbacks he’s supposed to go into isolation.
Due to this they end up ruining their confidence and starts fearing failure just to not feel worse than their peers, and their surroundings.
As parents, you can be more understanding and more outgoing towards your child during these tough times. You can take examples for your own childhood and mistakes to help your kid know that making mistakes is very common, and they should not feel ashamed for their career setbacks.
6. Promote “Learning From Your Failures”
The next step of learning that failure is the part of life, is to learn from the mistakes you make. Extracting valuable lessons from your setbacks is what the original theory of failure is.
Your child has the most chance of being successful when he/she learns how to take out important information and do’s and don’ts from his/her career setbacks.
Conclusion
In the end, the most important thing for your child should be to have good mental health, and the ability to deal with all kinds of challenges life throws at him. Parents play a big part in coaching children to cope with their career setbacks and develop their problem-solving skills without giving in to stress and health problems.
In addition to helping your child cope with career-related problems, you can also register for career counseling sessions with us!
Mindler is an ed-tech organization, ranked one of the best in its field in India. The company specializes in personalized assessments and reports to create guidance plans for students of class 8th to graduation.
Register for Mindler’s Career Counseling Online and kickstart your career with us!