Helping Kids Navigate Failure

Remember flunking a test? Getting cut from a team? Getting caught drinking? Crossing sexual boundaries? Wrecking the family car? Having to attend summer school? Do you remember hating those moments, feeling like your life was crashing down quickly, and desperately wanting to snap your fingers to make it all disappear? Chances are that you now look back on those times of failure as watershed moments in your life where you learned great lessons, where God helped you make directional adjustments that had a positive impact on your life, where you learned more about your God-given gifts and abilities, and where you learned great lessons in handling hardship. Your kids are going to fail and feel like failures at some point during their adolescent years. In fact, they will fail many times over. Walk through those failures with them by listening to their pain, processing that pain with them, sharing stories of how you learned from your own failures, and offering an eternal perspective on how God grows us through our failures.