3 Ways We Teach Kids to Fear Failure & How To Fix It

If you listen closely, you’ll hear it in classrooms, playgrounds, and dinner tables. A child says, “I’m just not a sports person” or, “I’m just not good at writing” as a response to having come 10th place in sports day or failed their English test. The belief that our abilities are fixed and can’t be learned or improved is called a Fixed Mindset, and it rarely comes from nowhere. There is a deeper reason for why kids develop this mindset early on, and it has everything to do with how we talk about failure.

A child who grows up with a fixed mindset likely gained it from one of these three factors:

1. How we reward success

2. How we respond to mistakes

3. How we measure worth

By ‘we’, I’m referring to parents, tutors, teachers, and society as a whole (although parents have a stronger influence especially in early childhood). A fear of failure is not an individual flaw; it is a learned response, that comes from how we tackle these three areas of kid’s lives. And we, as parents and educators, have the power to change it.

How we respond to failure

School systems were built to categorize. Grades, rankings, and tests create a ‘worth hierarchy’. The better your results, the more ‘worthy’ you are. This hierarchy teaches children two very dangerous lessons:

1. Your value as a person is measured by your scores.
2. Failing means you are worthless.

Even as adults, we have these voices in our heads that tell us the same things we learned in childhood. You made a mistake? What an idiot, you should have known better. You didn’t get that promotion? You must not be good at your job. You forgot your anniversary? You must be terrible at relationships. Without realizing, we let the fixed mindset creep into every area of our lives.

Why we pass it onto our children

Every generation before us has grown up in the same system, and learned the same lessons. And without someone in the family to “break the cycle”, these lessons get reinforced over and over again. While we might be aware of it consciously, the emotional wounds are still there, and still cause us to react a certain way when they hear about our kid’s failures - the same way our parents reacted to ours.

Why this matters beyond grades

Fear of failure is not just about low self esteem. It completely shifts the way kids approach opportunities in life, even into adulthood. Kids who are afraid to fail:

• Avoid challenges that could teach them resilience.
• Cover up mistakes instead of learning from them.
• Develop fragile identities tied to achievement.

On the other hand, a growth mindset lets children try, fail, reflect, and improve with mistakes. It means they get to build grit, creativity, and emotional resilience. These are the skills we really need for life, work, and relationships.

Three practical changes parents and teachers can make today

1. Praise process, not people

Stop saying, “You are so smart.” Try instead: “I noticed how you kept trying that problem. Tell me how you approached it.” Praise the strategies, the persistence and the curiosity.

1. Normalize mistakes

Say out loud when you got something wrong and what you learned. Create a space where children and family members can talk about their mistakes and the lessons they learned from it.

1. Make failure low stakes and informative

Do activities where failure is part of the process. Try open ended projects, prototypes, and experiments. Let them volunteer for fund raisers or conduct research on something. Encourage trying, even when there’s no guarantee of success.

What you can do today

• Ask your child about one thing they tried and failed at this week. Listen more than you speak.
• When they succeed, name the effort behind it. “I saw you’ve been practicing that for three days. I can see it really paid off.”
• Let them struggle for small, safe tasks. Resist the urge to jump in.

A different future is possible

Imagine classrooms that promote curiosity instead of perfect scores. Imagine parents who model learning instead of proving worth. Imagine a generation that sees failure as a guide, not their identity.

If you want practical tools for parents and teachers, we run workshops and give away free resources to help you shift culture at home and school. Teaching kids how to fail well is one of the kindest things we can do for their future.

If you want to dig deeper, join our workshops! Let’s build classrooms and homes that teach kids how to live, not survive exams.

Tais Loire Rosette