Parenting

Teaching Children to Be Wrong

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

A boy I had been working with for four months lost a card game in my office, and his mother later told me it was the most important thing that happened that year.

He had not lost a game in a very long time. His parents had been steering outcomes for years, so gently and so automatically that they had stopped noticing they were doing it. We had been building toward this. They had started with games of pure chance, where losing could not be blamed on anyone, and had sat with him through the storms that followed. The storms had gotten shorter.

Then, one afternoon, he lost. His face did what it had always done. His body started to. And then something else happened. He looked at me and said, in a small, furious voice, “I don’t like this.” I said, “I know. It’s hard to lose.” He sat there breathing for about a minute.

Then he said, “Can we play again?”

His mother could not find her voice in the hallway afterward. Five years of arranging card games so a small boy would never lose — and she had just watched him lose, breathe, and ask for another hand. Sixty seconds. She had budgeted a childhood.

What this argument is not

It needs saying at the outset, because it is the misreading a tired parent skimming is most likely to make.

This is not an argument for harsher consequences. Every principle of trauma-informed parenting stays exactly where it was: behavior is communication, connection precedes correction, regulation comes before consequence, and repair replaces shame. None of that is being walked back.

The argument is that trauma-informed parenting has a goal, and the goal is not a child who never encounters difficulty.

What discipline is actually building

Discipline exists to teach impulse inhibition, emotional regulation, some sense of how one’s behavior lands on other people, resilience under frustration, self-control, and a moral compass that keeps working when no adult is watching.

Every one of those is built by a child who is safe enough to meet reality and supported enough to survive it. Not one of them can be built by a child who is never permitted to lose.

The goal is not hardness. The goal is a child who can be wrong and still be herself.

The list parents read as a list of harms

Parents who have absorbed half of trauma-informed practice tend to hear the following as a description of damage. It is a description of childhood.

A child needs to be allowed to:

• Lose — games, contests, arguments — and find out that the feeling passes.
• Be disappointed without an adult immediately converting the disappointment into a purchase, a distraction, or a rule change.
• Be corrected in front of someone occasionally, and discover that being wrong in public is survivable.
• Not be the best at something a sibling is better at, without the family reorganizing to conceal it.
• Fail at a thing they tried hard at, and be met with company rather than rescue.
• Hear no from someone who loves them, and see that the relationship is unchanged an hour later.

Each of those is a small, supervised dose of reality. The dose is the point. A child given no dose does not become resilient later by receiving a very large one at nineteen.

The two things that have to happen together

What made that card game work was not that the boy lost. He had lost before, at school, in ways that produced nothing but shame.

What made it work was that he lost and was accompanied. Nobody fixed it. Nobody minimized it. Nobody told him it did not matter or that he had actually won on a technicality. Somebody sat beside him and named the feeling and let it be as hard as it was, and did not remove it.

That is the whole method, and it is harder than either of the alternatives. Removing the difficulty is easier. Leaving the child alone in it is easier. Staying, without fixing, costs an adult something — which is why the version families default to is usually the rescue.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A child who has never been wrong in a survivable way becomes an adult for whom every piece of corrective evidence is an existential threat. That adult is not difficult on purpose. They are defending the only structure they were given.

And the family around them will start doing what such families do: managing the information that reaches them, adjusting the truth to fit what they can absorb, paying costs on their behalf. Every wall this work describes begins in a house where being wrong was made unsurvivable — usually by people who loved the child and were trying to spare them something.

The sparing is the injury. Not the discipline.