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Children learn what failure means partly by watching the adults around them. How you react to a bad test, a burnt dinner or your own mistake at work sends a message about whether setbacks are a dead end or a step. This guide covers what research found, then gives you scripts and a simple family routine.
What do children learn from how parents see failure?
In a set of studies, Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck found that parents can see failure as either debilitating or enhancing, and that these views predicted parenting practices and, in turn, children's beliefs about intelligence. Children could accurately tell how their parents saw failure, though not their parents' beliefs about intelligence itself. Parents who saw failure as debilitating focused more on their children's performance and ability than on their learning, and their children tended to believe intelligence is fixed.
In other words, your general beliefs about ability may matter less than what your child sees you do when things go wrong.
Why mistakes can help learning
A review by Janet Metcalfe in the Annual Review of Psychology describes experiments showing that making errors and then getting corrective feedback is beneficial to learning. Errors made with high confidence were corrected more readily than low-confidence ones. Metcalfe stresses that corrective feedback, including analysing the reasoning that led to the mistake, is crucial, and suggests it may be worth encouraging errors in low-stakes situations so students perform better in high-stakes ones.
This fits an older finding. In studies by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, children praised for intelligence showed less persistence and enjoyment after a later failure than children praised for effort.
What to say, and what to avoid
Instead of "How could you get this wrong?", try "Which step went wrong? Let's find it."
Instead of "You're just not a science person.", try "This chapter hasn't clicked yet. What would help it click?"
Instead of "Don't worry, it doesn't matter.", try "It's disappointing. What can we learn from it?"
Instead of silence and a stern look, try "I made a mistake at work this week. Here's what I did about it."
The last one is the most often skipped. Sharing your own mistakes, and what you did next, shows failure as normal and useful.
A weekly family mistake debrief
Try this at dinner once a week for a month. Each person, adults included, answers three questions:
What is one thing that went wrong this week?
What did you learn from it?
What will you do differently next time?
Rules: no one comments on anyone else's mistake except to ask a question. Parents go first. Small mistakes count.
A worked example: a disappointing maths test
Isha, in Class 8, scores 11 out of 25 on an algebra test and hides the paper. When her mother finds it, she sits down and says, "Let's sort these into three piles: didn't know how, knew how but slipped, and ran out of time." Most errors are sign mistakes when expanding brackets, which Isha was confident about. Following Metcalfe's point about analysing the reasoning, they redo two questions together, saying each step aloud, and Isha spots where the minus sign gets lost. They agree she will redo the five wrong questions on Saturday without looking at the solutions. The next test is still not perfect, but the sign errors are gone.
Notice what the mother did not do: she did not judge Isha's ability, and she did not solve the problems for her.
Helping your child review mistakes
For a structured approach after a bad test, see our 60-minute review after a bad test, and for the science behind it, why making mistakes helps you learn. For what growth mindset research did and did not find, read growth mindset: what the big studies found.
When your child wants to compare their own working with a correct method, the Fermi Problem Library has worked problems with a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning rather than printing an answer. Encourage them to attempt the problem first, then compare.
This week, tell your child about one mistake you made and what you did next.
