Surrey Homes | SH46 | August 2018 | Wedding supplement inside

Surviving results season
Less than brilliant grades aren’t always a disaster, says Hilary Wilce, with the right support,
there’s as much to learn from failure as there is from success
It’s August, exam results season, and for many young people
a time of celebration and optimism. They are setting out on
the next step of life with their heads held high. But for others,
things might not be looking so rosy. Their results may have been a
terrible disappointment. They may have failed to get into the sixth
form or college of their choice, or into their chosen university.
When this happens, it can feel very bitter, but in fact there is
an awful lot to be said for failure. Indeed, the
“Talk about your
own mistakes
and what
you’ve learned
from them”
outcome of failure often turns out to be success.
The schoolchild who ‘fails’ to get into their
first choice primary school, or doesn’t pass the
eleven-plus, may well find themselves happier
and doing better at their alternative school. And
a clearing-place university might turn out to
be exactly the right one for a student to shine.
Failure also teaches lots of useful lessons. As
human beings we fail all the time – at work
and at home – but if we are smart we can learn from that failure.
We can figure out how to do things a different way, discover
that we’re capable of working harder, get to know ourselves
better and change the behaviours that are getting in our way.
That’s why good teachers positively welcome failure into
their classrooms and tell pupils that mistakes are essential to
good learning. They set high standards, but give students
the support, encouragement and non-judgmental feedback
they need to grow into doing as well as they can.
As parents, though, our instincts can be different. We
want to protect our children from failure because we know
how much the shame and pain of it can sting. But if we try
too hard to protect our children from all failure, they will
subliminally soak up our anxieties and become too scared to try
new things, or to come home with less than perfect results.
They will absorb the message that they must do everything
right, the first time they try it, and grow either timid and
perfectionist, or else rebel and act up because they know
they’ll never reach the high standards expected.
Parents who constantly push and bribe their children
for high grades, who bellow and admonish
their children on the touch lines of school
pitches, are always demanding of schools why
their children aren’t doing better… are people
who are, deep down, terrified of failure.
Instead of falling into these patterns, make
friends with failure and help your children to think
of it as a normal part of life. Encourage them to
look it in the face and see it as something that will
help them to learn better and grow stronger.
Talk about your own mistakes and what you’ve learned
from them. Avoid comparisons with higher-achieving
pupils, or talking about success and failure in black and
white terms. Instead encourage your child to see that their
brain is pliable and plastic, quite capable of stretching
itself round new things and rising to challenges.
Tell them that top athletes know that mental attitudes
matter just as much as sporting prowess and that’s why
they work as much on developing grit, determination
and resilience as on developing their physical abilities.
Because at the end of the day, that’s where the roots of
success and failure always lie – in how each one of us decides
to look at life and meet the challenges it flings at us.
129 surrey-homes.co.uk