'How do you overcome a child's frustration when they are finding something hard?'

You don’t!

I get these questions all the time.

How do I get my child to do it when they just don’t want to?

How do I deal with their frustrations?

How do I get them to deal with their frustrations?

What do I do when they just do not want to do it?

Let’s get one thing clear. You do not ‘overcome’ a child’s frustration. There is nothing to ‘overcome’. Frustration is just a feeling.

We can choose to make frustration mean something negative or to make it mean that something has gone wrong. Or we can just choose to see it as neutral. As something that just is.

My child is frustrated.

That is all.

There’s nothing to solve for and there’s nothing that needs to change.

I think we might have this picture perfect scenario in our head about what it ‘should’ look like. And when it doesn’t happen, we are the ones who get frustrated!

Let’s look at something very common that most of my 3 year old students find frustrating.

Writing.

I ask them to write the number 5 for example and they can’t. They think it’s not good enough. They think it’s too hard. They struggle to hold the pen. They get frustrated.

Nothing has gone wrong here.

This is what I say to my students when this happens,

‘That’s ok. Let’s move on to something else and come back to that later on - if you’d like to of course.’ And we move on.

Sometimes we come back to it and sometimes we don’t.

Frustration is part of the process. We feel frustration all the time, it’s only natural that our children do too.

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