A Mindset for Parents Who Have Anxiety About Their Child’s Future
If you are anything like me, every time your child is on the brink of participating in a big event you get a little nervous. The good thing is, you’re not alone. The bad thing is, it’s out of your control. Which may not be as bad as you think.
The fact is the less control you have over the outcome of your child’s life the better. Living your life is challenging enough, imagine having to live your child’s life too! Furthermore, parents are great cheerleaders, and sometimes great coaches, but their always bad teammates. So, just like you can’t do something for your child, don’t make the mistake of trying to do it with them either.
To that end, the best mindset to adopt when you’re nervous or feel anxiety about your child’s future is a long-term mindset. This is a mindset that accepts short-term obstacles, losses, and failures as not just part of the process, but the process itself.
The main reason your nerves and anxiety exist is because there is an obstacle in your child’s way that presents the real possibility of failure. When you adopt a long-term mindset, you view this possibility with optimism and see how failure could be a good thing.
Why Your Child’s Failures are the Key to their Success
Every motivational speaker and self-help guru will tell you that failure is the key to success. However, what’s often missing in their speeches is why! Why can’t someone just go from one success to the next repeatedly and keep growing and getting better?
Unfortunately, you can’t improve in life by playing it safe. Therefore, if your child takes the safe route and does only what guarantees success, then they will remain stagnant because they won’t have a reason to change their behavior. Consequently, if your child never changes, they will never get better. This is just a fact of life. The only way for your child to improve in the long-term is to constantly face obstacles in the short-term and learn how to do things better.
Moreover, in this process of trying to do things better, your child may or may not succeed. In fact, it’s likely they will fail just as much or more than they succeed. Thus, when your child learns to build the habit of constantly pushing the limits of “better”, they will also build the habit of failing forward.
As a parent, if you can understand this and adopt this long-term thinking as your mindset, your anxiety will start to subside slowly over time.