There’s something you and I likely have in common: a familiarity with the well-known children’s book The Little Engine that Could.

I’ll admit it’s a cheerful and uplifting story. We enjoyed it as children and now we read it to our own.

But here’s the thing. The message, ‘If we try, and we try, we’ll eventually reach our goal,’ has not always reflected my reality.

My experience is that sometimes we try and we try, and we end up falling on our face. And so do our kids.

I’ve thought long and hard about the messages we teach our children (and ultimately maintain as our core beliefs as adults). To expect our efforts will always result in consistent success is misleading at best. We’re setting kids up to have unrealistic expectations that life should and will be perfect, and that’s not the real world…

The message of persistence is a great one, but there’s a lesson our children are missing: how to rise from failure. Defeat happens to the best of us, so why not offer our kids the tools with which to accept, learn and grow from it?

The age-old adage ‘practice makes perfect’ needed to be looked at. So I decided to write a book about it.

The book is called Happiness Doesn’t Come from Headstands. It’s a modern day story about the search for happiness, and one girl’s discovery that, even in the face of failure, peace can be found.

As adults we have the power to nurture children’s growth. We can start by teaching kids that it’s okay to fail—that just because they have a failure, it doesn’t mean that they are a failure. By learning how to accept and learn from failure, they’ll be better equipped to achieve the happiness and success we so want for them in the first place….

To continue reading the article which shares “5 Points for Parents: How to Prepare for Defeat and Deepen Your Child’s Resilience” please view it on SavvyMom here!