Austin Scholar #76: How to help your kid get better at receiving feedback
& how I learned to accept feedback from my dad
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How I learned to accept feedback from my dad
How to help your kid get better at receiving feedback
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been reading and watching this week
My dad’s birthday was yesterday, so I really want to take the beginning of this newsletter to celebrate him.
Although he’s only the second funniest person I know (my sister would give me disappointed eyes if I said otherwise), he always knows how to make me laugh and smile. Dad: you make everyone you meet feel empowered–like they can do anything. I can only hope to have the same impact on the people around me as you. I love you so much and am so lucky that you’re my dad <3
Austin’s Anecdote: How I learned to accept feedback from my dad
For years, all I’ve wanted was to make my dad proud of me. I worked to be the smartest and hardest-working person I could be, to prove to him that I was good enough. Recently, I’ve been able to work on the “have to be perfect to be good enough” thing, but the desire for my dad to be proud of me hasn’t gone away, and I don’t think it ever will.
This used to make accepting feedback from him impossible.
I saw every critique or revision as a sign that I wasn’t good enough–that he wasn’t proud of what I was capable of. Unfortunately for me, though, my dad’s love language is helping people get better–to reach their full potential. Which means that he loves to give feedback.
Of course, this led to a depressing cycle of him wanting to help me and me feeling attacked–which made him want to help even more, which made me feel even more attacked. Not great.
So, I talked to my lovely therapist about it, and she had a fantastic recommendation: set boundaries. It’s not that I disagreed with any of the feedback my dad was giving me–it was just hard to hear it from him. The natural solution, then, was just to create some separation between the feedback and him.
And y’all know how I love saying things in writing, so we set up a little system where if my dad wants to give me feedback on something I’ve done, he just has to write me a note and email it to me.
Surprisingly, this degree of separation was really all I needed to not feel hurt. It wasn’t a big change, but it really altered how we communicated. And, we made sure to do something fun together after the feedback was given, like watching a new TV show or talking about baseball. This way, our interaction didn’t end with the critiques; it ended with smiles and love.
How to help your kid get better at receiving feedback
Of course, what my dad and I do won’t work perfectly for every family, so here are a few more ways to help teach your kid to receive feedback gracefully (especially when it’s from you):