Why You Want Your Child to Get Stuck
By Allyson Weaver, Founder of KidSense Learning
In a culture that often equates success with perfection and speed, the idea that we should want our children to get stuck may seem surprising — even uncomfortable. But what if those moments of struggle, frustration, and uncertainty are not signs of failure, but necessary and powerful opportunities for growth?
As parents and caregivers, we naturally want to shield our children from difficulty. Yet, research on how the brain learns tells us something profoundly different: it is in the very act of grappling with challenges — of getting stuck and finding a way forward — that deep, lasting learning takes root.
After completing an intensive workshop on learning and the brain, I was reminded of how much our understanding of intelligence and growth has evolved. Today, we know that supporting children means helping them embrace the process of learning — a process that includes effort, setbacks, and resilience — rather than focusing solely on outcomes.
With that in mind, I want to share ten essential insights drawn from decades of brain research — lessons that can help us rethink what it means to support our children in school and beyond. These truths remind us that when a child is “stuck,” they are often on the verge of their most meaningful growth.
Human brains are not fixed biologically to be able to perform certain tasks better than others, i.e. there is no such thing as a congenital “math” brain or “creative” mind.
All brains have neuroplasticity, that is we have the ability to rewire our own brains to accomplish new things; we rewire our brains through faith in our ultimate success (attitude), our acceptance of and resilience for struggle as what learning looks like, and our receiving the supports needed for us to struggle productively to reach a goal we have set for ourselves.
Getting stuck is required for learning and growth to take place; learning is not knowing “answers”; it’s a process of wondering, seeking, and finding new skills and concepts with both failures and successes along the way.
Mistakes are to be celebrated as interesting stops along the journey to learning something new and meaningful that we will hold forever.
Fear of failure is natural and should be acknowledged, but we must help children overcome this fear and embrace curiosity and the excitement that accompanies lasting growth.
Being wrong only feels bad because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that being smart is being perfect; the truth is, perfectionism prevents us from reaching our full academic potential and literally limits the breadth and depth of our learning.
Engaging in productive intellectual struggle and the growth that follows is an equity issue; every child deserves the right to make mistakes, to struggle, and to celebrate their own impactful growth when they’ve overcome the challenges to getting there.
High expectations for students matter, but we define high expectations not by expecting students to be correct (taking no risks to grow) but by how they exert themselves through sustained and purposeful effort, making plenty of mistakes as they go and integrating them into their learning process.
Students of all ability levels grow more when they make mistakes than when they avoid them.
Adults can serve as models for learning and growth by admitting mistakes and helping children see how we learn from them rather than shame ourselves (or others), as well as by engaging in what Dr. Amanda Jansen calls “rough-draft thinking,” that is demonstrating that we revise our learning as we go, focusing on process over product, and on growth over certainty. Academic excellence emerges from a genuine process of faithful and productive struggle, not from innate intelligence.
In the end, what we most want for our children is not just academic success, but the inner strength to face challenges with confidence, curiosity, and resilience. When we embrace the moments when our children get stuck — and guide them through the struggle rather than around it — we are giving them one of the greatest gifts: the belief in their own ability to grow, adapt, and persevere. Because real learning isn’t about always getting it right — it’s about having the courage to keep going when things get hard, and the wisdom to know that growth often begins exactly where we feel stuck.
