Like many reasonably bright kids, Big J is easily frustrated. VERY easily. He can see the result he wants and he thinks it should just work right away with no problem. When it doesn’t work, he grunts, groans, screams and yells in his frustration, which drives us out of our minds. Our first instinct has always been to jump in and try and make the screaming stop. Recently I’ve realized that’s the totally wrong reaction.

Big J is also naturally prone to laziness. “I can’t do it!” “I need help!” are frequently heard in our house. I can’t stand laziness in an adult and if I do nothing else, I want to train that out of him. That laziness in combination with the frustration could lead to a highly unsuccessful adult.

So, I was at a loss as to how to teach him to manage his frustration while encouraging him to be persistent. Then I realized… I was focusing so much on trying to teach him to manage his frustration because the noise he was making was so hard to listen to, that the persistence message kept getting lost. I realized I needed to forget about the frustration for a while. He’s 4 and it’s really hard to manage your emotions when you’re 4. I was circumventing the process of learning persistence by jumping all over the frustration thing. I would far rather raise a child who never learned to manage his frustration that one who never learned to persist at a task. What I need to be doing now is encouraging him to persist despite the frustration, and managing the emotional outbursts will come later. Let’s hope so anyway…

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