Q: My child often gets frustrated when she doesn’t get something “right” the first time. I’m noticing that sometimes she doesn’t want to try new things. How can I encourage her and help her work through frustration?
A: Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford University published a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she described two kinds of mindsets that people bring to their daily activities: fixed and growth. When we have a fixed mindset, we believe our skills and talents are permanent, as if we were born with them. As a result, we tend to respond to challenges with fear that we will be exposed as inadequate or less than others. When we have a growth mindset, we believe in our capacity to learn and grow through hard work and effort. In this mindset, we seek challenges and respond to failures or mistakes with creative, forward-moving responses.
We recommend observing your child, yourself, and others and noticing when the fixed and growth mindsets are at play. Simply becoming aware of them can make a transformative difference. Dr. Dweck recommends praising children for their effort and perseverance rather than their talent and intelligence in order to promote a growth rather than fixed mindset.
At Hiruko, we recognize frustration comes with the territory. We ask a lot of our students, and we actively seek to present them with challenges. We find it important to keep up with how students are doing in general. We note if they seem more tired than usual or more energetic, if they arrive to class ready to go or with some resistance, and we allow for this variation through our approach to teaching on any given day. Often things as simple as the weather, what we’ve eaten, and how much we’ve slept make the difference between joyful participation and resistance or trepidation.
Many factors can influence how kids respond to challenges at any given moment. One tried and true approach is to ask the student to set the tone and define the goal. Given the chance to assess their own state and actions, students usually respond by making their own effective adjustment. This kind of self-awareness is one of the cornerstone skills we teach at Hiruko.
Answered by: Hiruko Instructor, Angela Booker
