12 Steps to Teaching Your Child Perseverance

Teaching your child perseverance is a crucial part of teaching them to be resilient. Whether it’s for success in school or out of school, they’re going to need to persevere.

For many kids though, perseverance is difficult. It’s hard to keep going when you’re not getting the results you want. It can be frustrating, defeating and be a big blow to self-confidence.

But as hard as it is, we need to teach our kids the skills to persevere, even when things get difficult. It will allow them to thrive with their learning, get to where they want to go and ultimately give them valuable choices. Without this tool in their resilience toolkit, they’ll limit themselves; not just while they’re at school, but for the rest of their lives.

In my series, Talking Today’s Challenges, that takes place in the Minds of Wonder Community FB group, I spoke to one of its members whose biggest challenge was getting her daughter to persevere. Talking to the working mum, Martine, it became clear that there were two underlying reasons for her daughter’s lack of perseverance. One was a lack of self-confidence and the other was a fear of failure.

Self-confidence and learning to embrace failure are crucial to teaching your child perseverance. To find out how you can help your child in both of these areas, please check out these posts: Raising Confident Kids for Successful Learning/ Learning Through Failure.

In the highly engaging interview, I provided Martine with tips and strategies she could implement straight away to improve her daughter’s perseverance. Many parents will be able to relate to Martine’s challenges, who explains them in a refreshingly open and honest way. You can see the interview here:

12 tips to teaching your child perseverance

Here are 12 tips you can start to put into practice.

1. Encourage goal setting. Make them achievable and short-term.
2. Allow your child to see the benefits of persevering.
3. Talk about people who they admire or have been inspired by and how these people achieved great things by persevering.
4. Focus on their effort rather than the outcome.
5. Remind them what they achieved by persevering. Keep a progress chart to show and remind them of their growth.
6. Celebrate their wins, both big and small.
7. Focus on one thing at a time.
8. Continue to build their self-confidence.
9. Embrace failure.
10. Model perseverance. Show them how you persevere even when things get difficult.
11. Don’t be too quick to help.
12. Allow them to give up when necessary. If something doesn’t have any benefit, don’t force them to persevere for the sake of it. Keep the skill of persevering as a positive endeavour

Related: Raising Confident Kids Embracing Failure

Final thoughts…

The best gift we can give our kids when it comes to learning is the life skill of resilience. An important ingredient of being resilient is being able to persevere. As with most things, it’s not over night. Teaching your child perseverance is an on-going process, but it will be one they’ll thank you for 🙂

Over to you…

Is perseverance something that your child struggles with? Have you tried any of the tips in this post or are there some you’d like to know more about? If so, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.