Happy New Year to all! I pray that this will be a year filled with blessings for you and your family.
As the New Year begins, we are quickly approaching the end of our first semester, meaning our school year is halfway complete.
It is a good time to reflect on the growth and the blessings that your child has been involved in thus far.
What have the great successes been? What have been the failures?
Failures? Really, failures?
This word can be very hard for parents to accept. We never want our children to fail.
I do encourage you to step back and ponder this point of view. Please consider that children do indeed need to learn how to fail.
There is a growing body of research that is indicating that our young adults are lacking resilience. This lack resilience is being tied to the fact that they were not allowed to fail.
Failure is really not as bad as it sounds.
The key is that our young people need to be pointed to the lessons learned from failure and mistakes. Failure should lead to new opportunities and new ways of thinking. This is a very positive thing!
I would venture to say that failure can and does lead to blessings!
So, as we begin the New Year and soon a new semester, be ready to watch both success and failure.
When it is the latter, be ready to be the encourager who says try again. Or, the one who asks the right questions to point the young one in the right direction. That might be: “What else could you try?” or “Why do you think that didn’t work?” Do this instead of just providing the solution and you will be setting your child up for a lifetime of blessings.
