Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Could I suggest that she has a fear of failure? What you are describing generally sounds like my kids until we began to really talk about why they aren't doing stuff. ( It absolutely was the fear of peer rejection for clubs, not making the team for sports, not getting an A or being the smartest in a class.
I see this in my college students in class all the time. They won't start a paper/project because they are in control. Rather than submitting something that could possibly be critiqued as "less than."
Things you say she is interested in (which means she is likely not depressed) are things that are generally not related to success or failure.
Op again. This is a great insight. How do you counter it? How do you build that confidence?
I generally take my kids down the worst possible outcome chain of events. Rarely will the final outcome be something that will have severe repercussions. So we practice taking little risks. I told my oldest that if she got a B in a middle school class, I would give her $20 (since MS grades don't count for anything). She realized then that she was the one putting pressure on herself and it wasn't actually me or her dad. And we talked academically about learning rather than achievement. That too helped.
For sports, I forced them to do something. Once they see that I don't need them to be the star player on the team, just try their best, learn from mistakes, and have fun that took some pressure off of them.
And for a while I made them do daily gratitude journals so when they put the pressure on themselves they can remember feeling good about things.
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