Low Frustration Tolerance: What to do When Your Child Gives Up Easily

Three-year-old Marcus is trying to find where the pieces fit in a challenging puzzle. Four-year-old Ruby is working on how to keep her block tower from falling down. Omar and Zoey are looking for what they can use as superhero capes when Omar’s mom won’t let them use her scarves. These are all examples of kids hard at work solving problems.

This ability—to face a challenge and come up with effective solutions—is the key to developing resilience and is one of the most important skills for success in school, in relationships, and in navigating life. It is also an important component of building strong “executive functioning”, which is a child’s ability to manage his emotions and control his impulses so he can focus and maintain attention on the task at hand, draw on knowledge gained from past experiences, and to think creatively—to fix mistakes and try another strategy when the one he is using is not working.

You see this in real life when a child faces an obstacle, like not being able to fit the square block in the round space on the shape-sorter. Despite his frustration, he does not give up and toss the block across the room. Instead, he is able to stay calm enough to keep focusing on the task. He has done shape-sorters before and knows that he has to keep trying different spaces until he finds the correct one. Through this process of trial-and-error he successfully finds the right space for all the shapes. Solving the problem results in a powerful sense of mastery. 

Here’s how you can support your child’s ability to become a master problem-solver: