Encourage Your Kid To Screw Up

Have you ever reprimanded your kid for getting food all over the furniture? Or for breaking your favorite mug?

How many times have you gotten pissed off that your kid was doing things the wrong way and wished they would just get it right?

When your mini first learned how to walk did they get up and stroll across the living room? Or did they fall and get back up again a bunch of times? If you think about it you will realize that they would never have learned this essential life skill without falling a bunch of times first.

The stigma against mistakes carries over into adulthood. Even the most motivated of us don't like to make mistakes. They are the hassles and setbacks that keep us from reaching our goals as quickly as we hoped. As inevitable as mistakes are, we wish we would just get things right the first time around.

But did you know that mistakes are actually the key to success??

The path to learning any skill or reaching any goal is not linear, and you have to be really comfortable screwing things up a few times in order to succeed. The key is to not be afraid to go down a new, unfamiliar path.

It is extremely important that you teach your kid to become comfortable with failure. Without this skill they will be trapped in their comfort zone for the rest of their lives and never have the courage to venture into new endeavors.

This is counterintuitive to what the average kid learns growing up. The conventional school system will mark up a test with red X's when a question is answered wrong, and praise a perfect score. This teaches a kid that they shouldn't bother to learn anything voluntarily unless it's easy.  

What should really be celebrated is the effort put into learning, not the result. The harder it is to learn a new skill, the higher the reward. 

For instance, Manny and I had no idea how to launch a brand before we actually launched FlyDad. We definitely screwed a bunch of things up and learned from them. We were willing to put in the work and take the hit of the mistakes because we wanted to build the greatest dad company on the planet.

We will teach our kids to have this same tenacity in everything they do.

So encourage your kids to try new things. Push them in being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Celebrate when they screw it up. Explain to them that the worst thing they can do is stay stagnant.