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Key points
- It feels natural to blame others or the situation when things go wrong.
- Blame is toxic and wastes the learning opportunities that problems provide.
- John Wooden was a famous basketball coach who didn't allow his players to blame others for their problems.
- By modeling how blame can become problem-solving, you give your child an essential gift for life.
When something goes wrong, it can feel natural to look for who or what’s to blame. This is as true for adults as it is for kids:
“I hit Sammy because he tried to take my toy.”
“I’m late for work because my kids were slow getting dressed this morning.”
Blame Is Toxic
The act of blaming poisons the blamer and the environment, as well as the target of blame. Everything goes better when you put your focus on solving the problem instead of looking for who or what’s to blame.
A Growth Mindset Makes You Happier and More Successful
Learning to focus your mind away from blame and toward problem-solving is a basic tenet of the growth mindset that Carol Dweck and many others have been investigating for the past three decades. Their research has demonstrated that a growth mindset can help people do better in every area of life, from academic success through relationships to health, happiness, and well-being.
A growth mindset is the belief that every ability develops over time with effort. By contrast, people with a fixed mindset believe they’re limited by what they were born with. They see themselves and others as intelligent (or not), athletic (or not), creative (or not), etc. Mindset is the best-selling book where Carol Dweck first described her research that explored the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
Coach Wooden Welcomed Failure
In Mindset, Dweck writes about people who have demonstrated the effectiveness of a growth mindset in action. One of the most memorable of these was John Wooden, a college basketball coach with an extraordinary record not only for creating winning teams but also for supporting young people from challenging backgrounds to succeed in ways beyond the dreams anyone had ever had for them.
Wooden, who coached teams at the University of California, Los Angeles, to 10 national championships in a twelve-year period, taught his players to welcome failure. He showed the young men on his teams that the best way to learn anything is to get it wrong. He frequently reminded them that it wasn’t what they were given that mattered but what they did with it. One of the observations he’s remembered is, “Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.”
Coach Wooden Didn’t Allow Blame
Blame was one of Wooden’s pet peeves. His players learned that if they missed a shot, they couldn’t complain about someone knocking into them, and they weren’t allowed to grumble about the referee if they lost the game. As far as Wooden was concerned, it was OK to lose a game, but it was not OK to blame anyone or anything for that. One of his most frequent messages was, “You aren’t a failure until you start to blame.”
Wooden showed his players that failure is a wasted opportunity if you don’t own it. When you look for someone to blame, you miss the chance to learn from the problem.
Switch Your Child’s Focus From Blame to Problem-Solving
The best way to help your child move away from blame and toward owning their mistakes is to model that approach yourself.
1. Talk to your child about the benefits of a growth mindset and how blame is a marker of a fixed mindset.
2. Let your child know when you catch yourself blaming someone or something for a problem you’re having. Model what it looks like to make a switch to problem-solving:
You hear yourself saying, “You knocked into me and made me spill my coffee.”
Ask for a redo, and say, “Oops. I’ve spilled my coffee. I’d better clean that up.”
After the cleanup, you might say, “It looks like I need to stay farther away from you when I have coffee in my hand.”
3. Ask your child to point out to you when you use blame. Ask for their help in reframing it as problem-solving.
4. Your child is more likely to look for someone or something to blame when you are critical, impatient, and demanding. Try to treat your child’s use of blame with patience and kindness.
“Oops. Was that blame I heard? How can we reframe that?”
5. Role play blame vs. accepting mistakes. Work with your child to create problem scenarios where you or your child might be tempted to blame. Take turns acting them out, using blame as well as accepting the mistakes as learning opportunities. Your child will probably love putting you into terrible imaginative situations and having you behave abominably. This can be fun, as well as providing some learning that will be useful in every part of your child’s life—home, school, relationships, and (later) work.
6. Some children have a hard time accepting responsibility for their own actions and can’t move beyond blame. In those circumstances, you may benefit from getting some professional help.
People who avoid blame and instead learn from their setbacks are more resilient than others. They’re more likely to take on tough challenges, to look at problems constructively, and to work through failure to a much higher success than otherwise possible.
References
Note 1. I’m writing here about moving away from blaming others and toward a problem-solving habit of mind. Still, sometimes people blame themselves for problems, even when they’re clearly beyond their control. That’s a different kind of blame problem, one which F. Diane Barth discusses here.
Note 2. As with most ideas that capture the public imagination, the idea of a growth mindset became controversial as people began to implement it widely and out of context. Dweck and others have recently completed major studies that demonstrate the value of a growth mindset when it’s taught in a growth mindset culture.
