How To Teach Your Children To Tolerate Frustration, In 6 Steps
Parents want the best for our children, and in that attempt to give them everything, we can make the mistake of not letting them develop as people or allowing them to experience life for themselves. These behaviors, which may seem like great displays of love and protection, in the long run cause children to not acquire some skills to cope with life and that can be useful in their future, when they only depend on themselves.
One of these skills is frustration tolerance, which is closely related to resilience and people’s ability to cope with less pleasant situations. People with low frustration tolerance have serious difficulties controlling their emotions, are very vulnerable to emotional pain, are impulsive and impatient, and have difficulty adapting to changing environments.
Related article: “What is frustration and how does it affect our lives?”
Learning to tolerate frustration is key to children’s well-being
Frustration tolerance is a concept developed by Albert Ellis, a well-known psychologist who we talked about in our article “Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT).
And it is that supporting or tolerating frustration is necessary to face the adversities that life can present or the bad moments that we sometimes have to live through. Otherwise, we can become vulnerable people in these situations or emotionally dependent people in interpersonal relationships. Life sometimes presents us with problems, and we must be able to face them and solve them instead of running away from them.
When things do not go as we wish or the expectations we had in mind are not met, frustration can appear which, if not tolerated, gives way to sadness, disappointment, anxiety, anxiety and disillusionment.
Therefore, tolerating frustration is being able to face the problems that arise despite the discomfort and pain it causes, allowing you to better adapt to situations and, therefore, react appropriately. When it comes to educating new generations, this is extremely important.
Keys to teaching your children to tolerate frustration
Luckily, it is possible to work on frustration tolerance. In the following lines we give you some keys to being able to educate your children to be more tolerant of frustration
1. Educate with values such as effort
When we educate our child, we must think about the values he is acquiring. We may think that giving him the best clothes or toys that he wants without requiring any effort is an action of a good father. However, we must educate him so that he understands that the things he receives are a consequence of his effort In this way, he will learn that in life, if he wants something, he has to fight for it. Things are not always going to come to you as gifts.
2. Teach him to set and achieve realistic goals
Frustration often appears because we set goals that are irrational and unattainable. When we have very high expectations and we do not meet them, then we can suffer for it. Setting realistic goals and meeting them teaches us to be mature and rational, and makes it clear to us that we must avoid those situations that lead us to feel frustrated and, therefore, to suffer.
When raising a child we must always be consistent with what we tell them, because we are models for them If we intend to educate them in values and then we ourselves are unable to apply what we are teaching them, learning will not occur. Therefore, our way of acting affects how our children develop, since vicarious learning is especially important at these ages.
Related article: “Vicarious learning: observing others to educate ourselves”
4. Don’t give in to tantrums
Giving in to tantrums is a way of reinforcing negative behaviors, and causes a child to learn that they can get whatever they want simply by crying or throwing tantrums. When we give in to their tantrums, we are sending him the message that he can get whatever he wants by acting like this, and we will not leave him time to reflect on the frustration of not getting his way. Sometimes suffering a little is good for learning valuable lessons.
5. Set limits for your child
Children and adolescents should have clear boundaries to know how to act. That does not mean that we should be authoritarian with them, simply make them understand that there are certain behaviors that have negative consequences for them.
If we give a child a wide berth to do whatever they want, they will always get their way and, therefore, will not value anything. When he finds himself in situations where things do not go the way he wants, he will feel a great sense of failure for not having learned from the unpleasant experiences of the past.
Following the previous point, difficult experiences are a great opportunity to learn new things, because although many times we are not aware, we also learn from pain. In fact, experiential learning is one of the best ways to learn. Now, as long as we learn from the experience through self-reflection.
