3 ways to reframe failure for your teen

Fear of failure holds us back in many areas of life, but it starts in school. When teens get stuck in “fear of failure” mode, they:

• procrastinate,

• give up too soon, and

• distract themselves with things like gaming, endless scrolling and YouTube rabbit holes.

Psychologists call this "avoidance behavior," and it's a major roadblock to success.

Research also shows that fear of failure is one of the strongest predictors of academic anxiety and underachievement. It leads to lower goals and robs them of valuable opportunities to learn.

Here’s the good news: schoolwork is the perfect vehicle to help your teen develop a healthy perspective on failure.

When we “do” school the right way, assignments and tests build confidence and resilience, making it easier for your child to face challenges head on and bounce back from setbacks.

Here are 3 ways to help your teen build a better relationship with failure:

1) Normalize failure in your home

One of the most damaging beliefs is that we shouldn’t fail - that it’s abnormal and to be avoided at all costs. We want our teens to know that failure isn’t just normal, it’s necessary.

The more you talk about failure in your home in a positive light, the better. Here are some different entry points:

• Neuroscience shows that making mistakes and struggling actually makes us better thinkers - we learn more and better from our failures than our successes. When we make errors and pay attention to why we made those errors, our brains form new neural connections that improve problem-solving and performance (#neuroplasticity). Willingness to make and learn from mistakes literally builds growth mindset.

• Psychology research shows that failing improves emotional regulation. People who have a good relationship with failure demonstrate higher levels of psychological well-being and achieve more ambitious long-term goals. That’s right - getting good at failing makes us happier and more successful!

• Entrepreneurs are known for a saying: fail fast, fail often. Breakthroughs come after unsuccessful attempts, and tolerance for failure is associated with innovation. The more you fail, the closer you are to success. Self-made billionaire Sara Blakely (founder of Spanx 🙌) said that every night at the dinner table, her Dad would ask her what she failed at that day. He’d be disappointed if she didn’t have something to share because failure represented trying new things, expanding her comfort zone and learning - in this way, failure was its own success metric.

The crux of the reframe here is that we don’t avoid failure - we want to get comfortable with it and good at it.

We want your teen to understand that success stories are built on failure.

Whether it’s J.K. Rowling getting 12 rejections before someone saw value in Harry Potter - imagine if she’d given at #5 or #10?! - or Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team, successful people fail a lot first.

As Jordan said: “I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Failure isn't the opposite of success—it's a stepping stone to it.

2) Create a failure resume

This is an idea I came across from Stanford professor Tina Seelig, who has her students create a failure resume.

Here’s an explanation in Tina’s own words:

“I have my students craft a résumé that summarizes all their biggest screw ups — personal, professional, and academic. For every failure, each student describes what they learned from that experience. They realize [how to] come to terms with the mistakes they have made and to extract important lessons from them.

The ratio of our successes and failure is pretty constant. So, if you want more successes, you are going to have to tolerate more failure along the way.”

Something I really like about the failure resume - it helps our teens consider why they failed. Too often, our kids do NOT learn from failure.

They might feel bad or sad but generally the takeaway is “try harder next time.”

This is not helpful or even close to a good takeaway because “trying” - expending effort and energy without strategy - does not produce the outcome they want.

Whether your teen writes down that they failed a test because they crammed the night before, or that they keep taking 0’s for missing assignments because they try to keep track of deadlines in their head - identifying what doesn’t work enables them to find what does work (e.g. how to actually study or manage their calendar).

I encourage you to create your own failure resume at the same time as your teen. Have some fun with it. Model how you learn from failures and even laugh at them down the line. Openly sharing your own failures can make it easier for your kid to share theirs. Turn it into a family bonding and skill-building activity 🤓 

3) Graded tests or assignments? Keep ‘em.

Graded work is gold. It’s a simple, free and insanely powerful way to improve in school….yet hardly any students take advantage.

Here’s how your teen wins by taking a few minutes to analyze their grade:

• Saying that we can and should learn from failure is different (and obviously less effective) than actually learning from failure. Going through missed questions, investigating why they got the grade they did - whether an actual F or simply lower than what they wanted - builds the mindset that failure means learning and strengthens the muscle of reflecting without ruminating.

• Analyzing the grade takes focus off of them. Grades are data, nothing more. We know the grade doesn’t reflect intelligence, personal failings or innate flaws; what we don’t know is whether we got this grade because we didn’t actually understand the content, struggled with specific question types, or something else - that’s what we want to figure out. The grade isn’t about us but the strategies we used (or didn’t use) leading up to or on the test. Depersonalizing failure in this way makes it easier to genuinely learn from it.

• They practice resourcefulness. Graded work is a valuable and woefully underleveraged resource, and resourcefulness itself is a skill most students don’t build.

• The end point of analyzing their grade is determining next steps. This means more opportunities for your child to make empowering decisions - for example, to take initiative (go see or email the teacher for clarification?) or actively practice a skill that will lead to a better grade (time management? studying?).

Graded work is also great way to kick off their failure resume 😊 

The bottom line: failure is not bad. It’s not an end point. It’s a critical learning mechanism that unlocks our potential - this is why the ability to fail, learn, and readjust is fundamentally more important than initial success.

The sooner your teen starts practicing this belief, the sooner they’ll face challenges and failures with greater confidence, compassion and capacity for growth✨ 

Talk soon,

Kelsey

PS if your teen struggles with school, my flagship program that shows them HOW to learn and get the grades they’re truly capable of can help. It walks them through the exact strategies and skills they need to succeed in school (and life). It’s 50% off until the end of this week - only $497 with the code 2025LEARNHOWTOLEARN - and you get lifetime access. Click here to take the guesswork out of better grades with less stress.