children are no longer receptacles for our blame and pain, they have less
need to release their emotional reactions on others. A child who is
respected and whose feelings are honored when it makes a mistake
doesn’t turn around and dishonor another person.HOW YOU CAN TRANSFORM MISTAKES INTO
SPIRITUAL GOLD
Our children learn how to handle their emotions as they observe us during
periods of stress. Every day affords abundant opportunities to model
being at ease with our imperfections. This means accepting our wounds,
fallibility, and the fact that—no matter how aware we may imagine
ourselves to be—we operate from a fair degree of unconsciousness.
Our children need to see that the mess of life can always be mined for
emotional and spiritual gold. Once they realize this, they are freed from
fear of failure, able to accept that mistakes are an inevitable and even
essential aspect of life.
As we saw earlier, the way to handle our children’ s mistakes is to ask
ourselves how we would want our friends to handle ours. Would we want
to be lectured to death? Would we want to be reminded over and over
how much pain we caused them because we were late for their birthday
party? Would we want them to go on and on at us? Would we want to
feel as if our love and devotion were in question? Yet this is the way
many of us regularly react to our children’s mistakes.
Particularly when our children don’t do well in school, it’s widely
believed that if we tell them to “try harder,” “study more,” or “don’t give
up,” we are equipping them to overcome their fear of failure. In reality,