Your Teen Is Not Their Failure
When your teen fails, they define themselves by that failure and it affects their self-esteem, their identity. The poor performance, the missed goal, the drug problem, the teen pregnancy, the rejected girl or boyfriend define who they are. “Man, I’m such a loser!”
Irrespective of what you may have thought about the speech President Obama gave to students yesterday, these are a couple of the many paragraphs that stood out :
“That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, ‘I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.”
Go to www.whitehouse.gov to read the rest of the speech.
You can create the teachable moment by suggesting one thing, a small thing to change, and be proud of. So instead of, “I’m simply not good at science.” “I’m not a physics person.” “I hate history.” Try, I will make the change to ask a question when I don’t know the answer.” “I will stay after class to get help on my physics.” “I will look for a humorous slant every time I read something in history.”
Your teen may find that they have a knack for science and discover the field of nursing. They can understand their video games because of the concepts in physics and now they want to be a civil engineer, or they can appreciate the references to The Great Depression because of the history lesson on FDR and now they want to inspire other students to enjoy history.
Let them learn from their failures and in doing so better prepare for their future. They need to know they can do this on their own, but they may need your help to define the failure rather than letting the failure define them.
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