When Things Are Hard (Part 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaVa1fxLR0s
Hello GPS Community,
So far in this series I've written about naming feelings, asking for help, and handling the everyday friction of being around other people. This edition is about something harder for all of us! What do we do when things genuinely don't go a child's way.
Sometimes (or often) we lose a game. We have the friendship wobbles. We have the piece of work that came back covered in corrections. Common at GPS is the audition we didn’t get (we don’t have enough spots!). In Year 5 and 6 it’s not being selected for a captaincy. It’s the setbacks. Regular readers will remember that I wrote a piece earlier in the year about resilience that is quite similar, but this goes more in depth and builds on that piece.
Here is a thing that took me a while to really understand. The instinct to smooth the path for a child, to step in early, fix the problem, take the sting away, give a spiel about how fantastic they are despite the set back, comes from a place of love and care and it is completely natural. I feel it. But coping is a skill like any other, and skills are built by using them.
A child who is never allowed to struggle never gets the practice. We don't learn to handle disappointment by having disappointment kept away from us. We learn it by feeling it, getting through it, and discovering on the other side that we were, and are, okay.
So part of our job, both parents and teachers alike, is to let children meet difficulty on purpose, in a setting where it is safe to. We set work that is a genuine stretch, because a task you can already do teaches you nothing and a task that is just beyond you is where the learning lives. We try to let children sit with a hard problem before we rush in with the answer. We try to treat a mistake as information rather than a disaster. None of this is leaving children to flounder. It is the opposite: it is being right there beside them while they do the hard thing, so that the struggle stays the productive kind and doesn't tip into the overwhelming kind. And if it is a bit overwhelming, the stakes aren’t set too high. It’s learning, and like taking free throws at training, every time we miss helps us work on getting more of them in the future.
The reframe I'd most like to pass on is about mistakes and setbacks themselves. It is very easy, and a bit of a slippery slope to go from "I got this wrong" to "I am not good at this," and from there it is a slippery slope to "there's no point trying.” We see it all. the. time. This negative self-talk that is so internalised and reinforced, it’s extremely challenging to reappraise. But, a huge amount of what we aim to do is gently interrupting that slide.
A mistake is the most useful thing we can do: it shows you exactly where the next bit of learning is. A setback is not evidence that you can't, it is the normal texture of getting better at anything worth doing. When a child genuinely takes that on board, they stop being so afraid of hard things, and a child who isn't afraid of hard things will try almost anything. This is where PERCI comes into the frame and part of the reason PERCI now exists.
We are people who take academic risks, we try new things knowing that it might not be successful. We aren’t adverse to challenges because we know that there are people around us we can turn to if we can’t figure it out on our own.
This is not about brushing past real distress. There is a difference between the healthy struggle of a hard maths problem and a child who is genuinely overwhelmed, and a big part of the skill, for us and for them, is telling the two apart. Coping does not mean a stiff upper lip, and it does not mean a child should manage everything alone. It means a child who can feel the disappointment, stay steady enough to think, and find a way forward, leaning on the adults around them when they need to. That last part connects right back to part 3: knowing when to push through and when to ask for help is itself one of the skills we hope to instill and something most adults I know still struggle with, including myself.
At home, the most useful thing is often the hardest to do, because it means resisting the urge to jump in and fix it. When your child hits a setback, you don't have to make it better straight away. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is, "that's really disappointing, I can see why you're upset," and then sit with them in it for a moment before moving to "so what do you reckon we could try?"
You are showing them two things at once: that the feeling is allowed, and that it isn't the end of the story. If you can let them solve the bit they're capable of solving, even when it would be quicker to do it for them, you are handing them something they will use for the rest of their lives. You’re handing them independence. Often, the time spent thinking about the problem will reveal the answers. If we jump in too early, they don’t get this opportunity and they begin to immediately turn to help before attempting, and most importantly, before they sit with it and reflect on the problem. In class we see this as children immediately going “I can’t do this, I need help” instead of sitting with the problem, bouncing ideas around, reflecting, writing ideas down, trying, ideating, improving. It’s just ‘help me’.
Because that is what we are really building across all of this. Not children who never fall over, but children who know, deep down, that they can get back up.
Next edition is the last in this series, and I'll bring it back to where it all sits: respect, and treating everyone fairly, even the people we find hard to get along with.
As always, my door is open if you would like to talk about any of this. You can typically find me in the Junior Campus Learning Lab on Thursdays and Fridays.
Tyler, Mental Health and Wellbeing Leader