Rethinking Mistakes

Do You See What I See? New Ways to Bridge Difference In Thinking and Responding to Mistakes

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When asked about what nine through nineteen-year-olds want adults to know about people their age in the Breakthrough Years study, a seventeen-old girl wrote about wanting to be a writer, a dream her parents see as a mistake.

The more that I’ve thought about this girl’s message to all adults—especially to her own parents—it highlights some of the differences in the ways adults and young people think about mistakes and how we can bridge these divides.

How Young People Want Us to See Mistakes

This seventeen-year-old begins with the challenge:

I've seen the same phrase everywhere. "Teenagers are treated like children and expected to act like adults." There is this awkward, in-between learning phase we're going through. But let me explain why this hurts.

Treating me like a child is upsetting because when I turn 18, I feel like I'm supposed to magically turn "adult" and know what I'm going to do with my life.

When you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, they have big aspirations and wonderful dreams. In kindergarten, I wanted to be a paleontologist. Now, I want to be a writer.

This is a dream her parents see as problematic:

When you ask me what I want to be when I'm 17, you criticize the answer. It costs a lot of money to go to school, it's impractical, and I'll never make enough money to support myself. When did I reach the age where I'm not supposed to believe in myself anymore?

They also see the classes she takes along the way to becoming a writer as wrong:

I'm taking an AP class at my high school right now. My dad destroyed a lot of my confidence when I was making my schedule. He told me that I would be too busy and that it would overwhelm me. He made some comments about my future, and how I would never be able to achieve what this class was teaching. The first term I took half out of spite. It's my favorite class. It's something I love doing. I'm allowing myself to experience my big dreams. It shouldn't feel like I have to prove somebody wrong about what I like doing.

Also, I'm not an adult. If I don't understand taxes or job applications, don't ridicule me and tell me I'm dumb. I've never done it before. Don't treat me like I'm four because I have no experience being 30.

This teen is not alone in how she wants adults to deal with mistakes (doing something wrong, intentionally or not, in school and in life). Others who write about mistakes have similar messages:

First, they want us understand mistakes are integral to growing up.

We are just kids and we do make mistakes.
—Fourteen-year-old girl

We are just trying to get by. We will make mistakes, but that's all part of growing up.
—Sixteen-year-old boy

Second, they want us to see that they aren’t stupid.

We are learning so help us… don’t be so judgmental and don’t assume we are dumb.
—Sixteen-year-old girl

How Adults See Mistakes

In the Breakthrough Years study, we asked the parents of this nationally representative group of nine through nineteen-year-olds how they respond when children do things that are wrong.

As the figure below shows, it’s less that parents have a fixed mindset,¹ believing that things can’t change (38% to 39%) or that they feel they’ve failed, their kids are out to get them, they’re going to be judged negatively or they’ve lost control (30% to 42%).

What’s seems to more central is the desire to protect children from failing (79%) and believing children should have known better at their age (70%).

The fear-factor—wanting to shield children from mistakes is real and fully understandable. I don’t know about you, but I can identify with this teenager’s parents who want to protect her because the odds of supporting herself as a writer are low. We as adults know things kids don’t know—knowledge that can profoundly affect their lives.

When we’re in situations like this, it’s natural for us to want to fix things, as 54% of parents report wanting to do. However, as an adult, I also know other adults whose childhood dreams were criticized, scorned or thwarted and I see what a scar that can leave.

There’s a middle ground that can bridge these divides, where we can share adult knowledge in ways that can work better for us and for our kids.

Helping Kids With Mistakes

1. Lean directly into our own fears and stress.

Research by Jeremy Jamieson of Rochester University and others have found that our view of stress matters. Do we see the situation as harmful, something that should be avoided (a stress-avoidance mindset) or do we see it as something we can lean into and learn from (a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset)? Stress-enhancing means that we understand that the physical and emotional responses to fear and stress—like a rapid heartbeat or breathing fast—have the potential to help us view stress as a challenge, not a threat, which in turn, enhances our ability to handle problems. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel of UCLA further describes this. Threats create a “no brain-state” he says, that activates a protective response of fighting or fleeing, while challenges activate a “yes brain-state,² when ideal learning can take place.”³

If we lean into the fear for our kids, seeing it as a challenge, we can have a more intentional response.

2. Consider how we see children’s capacities.

The seventeen-year-old says she’s treated like a child but expected to be an adult and that’s a perfect description of another finding in our study: that a significant proportion of parents see the teenage brain as immature, defining young people as what they’re not—adults. They are teenagers and they’re supposed to explore who they want to be as they move out into the world.

How we see our kids affects how we act toward them. By telling this teen that she wasn’t competent to take the AP course, her dad runs the risk of having his daughter believe that—though she did take an opposite tack and took the course, in part, to prove him wrong.

The same is true for younger children. A friend of mine told me about her second-grader forgetting to take his backpack to school. She was ready to run it to school—it had his homework, snacks and water for the day—when she realized she was seeing him as incapable of learning how to remember his stuff and she didn’t want him to believe that about himself.

3. Focus on WHAT we do want kids to learn.

This is a gift that author and teacher Jessica Lahey has given all of us in her book The Gift of Failure,⁴ where she explores why failure has become a dirty word and argues that we need to stop fixing things for children in order for them to experience failures and setbacks. Otherwise, she writes they won’t learn to cope and solve problems for themselves. The gift we can give them, in her words, is to parent “for resilience in the face of mistakes and failures.”

In this case of my friend, she decided that she wanted her son to learn to remember his backpack and the best way was to live without it for a day.

Similarly, the seventeen-year-old’s parents could help their daughter figure out how to follow her dreams with the stipulation that she find ways to support herself as she does so.

4. Focus on HOW we can best help kids learn.

It wasn’t so easy for my friend to help her child reflect when he came home from school. The day had been rough and he was angry. But she stuck to it and after some time had passed, she asked him how he might remember his backpack the next day. He decided to put it by the front door.

This mother was asking her son to reflect and as such, he was coming up with a solution, all the while gaining resiliency and learning the skill of taking on challenges.

Reflection is critical to learning skills, as shown in an experiment by Philip David Zelazo of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues. They asked children to play a sorting game where there are right and wrong answers. When children made a mistake, the experimenter paused, asked them to think about the rules for the sorting game, to state what the mistake was, and how they might play the game differently next time. By reflecting on what they could learn from mistakes, the children made fewer of them.⁵

5. Understand the nature of learning as trial-and-error.

The above four strategies are all useful, but I don’t think they get to the core of the issue. If we see mistakes simply as bad or as wrong (a view that most of us have had drilled into us from our earliest days), we neglect the fact that learning itself involves trial-and-error.

This is beautifully illustrated in a study by Ariana Galván of UCLA and her colleagues that placed the learning process under a microscope (a brain scanner, actually), thus looking at it in slow motion.⁶ Galván explains the experiment:

Participants see a series of butterflies. Each butterfly is presented with two different colored flowers. We ask participants to determine which flower the butterfly will land on. Sometimes it lands on the white flower, sometimes on the orange flower—but over time the participant learns which flower the butterfly prefers.⁷

Each time participants selects an answer on a computer, they see “correct” or “incorrect” on the screen. As they play, they accumulate information through a trial-and-error process.

This is a pretty rote example of learning—an example where there is a correct and an incorrect answer—not complex, like what a teenager should do with her life or a second-grader forgetting his backpack.

If we put our own learning under a microscope, we will see something similar. It’s how we learn how to parent. Think of having a second child. We’ve learned what works and what doesn’t with our first and then our second comes along. We can build on what we know, but we have to problem-solve again. It’s the same with a new boss or a new relationship.

As I was writing this, I watched my husband learn a different way of getting rid of all of the junk email and scams that come piling onto his phone. There are rules but he was learning to apply them in a trial-and-error process.

When we understand that learning is a trial-and-error process and that making mistakes and figuring out how to resolve them are central to learning itself, we’re better positioned to parent in ways that helps kids achieve their dreams, as this seventeen-year-old so very much wants. She writes:

I went on a rant, but do you know what that means? It means I have a lot of built-up resentment. That resentment is coming from being treated disrespectfully. Let kids and teenagers alike embrace their dreams, let them ask questions, and let them screw up. Let me build resiliency and please, please believe in me.

1. Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol Sorich Dweck, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” Child Development 78, no. 1 (2007): 246–263; Carol I. Diener and Carol S. Dweck, “An Analysis of Learned Helplessness: Continuous Changes in Performance, Strategy, and Achievement Cognitions Following Failure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 5 (1978): 451–462; Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).

2. Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity and Resilience in Your Child(New York, Bantum, 2019).

3. Ellen Galinsky, Interview with Daniel J. Siegel, July 18, 2023.

4. Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. (New York: Harper, 2016).

5. Stacey D. Espinet, Jacob E. Anderson, and Philip David Zelazo, “Reflection Training Improves Executive Function in Preschool-Age Children: Behavioral and Neural Effects,” Development Cognitive Neuroscience 4 (April 2013): 3–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2012.11.009.

6. Juliet Y. Davidow et al., “An Upside to Reward Sensitivity: The Hippocampus Supports Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in Adolescence,” Neuron 92, no. 1 (2016): 93–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.08.031.

7. Adriana Galván, interview by Ellen Galinsky, May 3, 2017.