How Teaching Kids to Say ‘Please Let Me Know If I’m Wrong’ Eases Anxiety Around Mistakes
Last Tuesday, I sat across from 8-year-old Leo at the scarred pine kitchen table I use for after-school tutoring. His half-empty apple juice box sweated through its cardboard wrapper onto the placemat, and he’d just crumpled his math worksheet halfway up the page after crossing out his third attempt at a multi-step word problem. I was gearing up to do my usual routine: point out the two steps he got right, remind him mistakes are just part of learning, talk him through the tricky third step. Then he lifted his head, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said, completely out of the blue, “My dad says I should say this when I think I messed up. Please let me know if I’m wrong.”
I’d been working with Leo for four months by that point. He was the kid who’d hide his paper under his arms if I leaned in to check his work, who’d gotten sent to the nurse three times that semester with stomach aches before math tests. His mom told me he’d started refusing to raise his hand in class at all, because if he got the answer wrong, the other kids laughed and he’d rather not try than be wrong. His dad, a software engineer who’d started doing improv comedy on weekends to get out of his work comfort zone, had picked up the line from his improv teacher. The teacher said the unwritten rule of improv isn’t “don’t mess up” — it’s that you invite correction instead of shutting down. So he’d started saying it at work when he turned in code, then at home when he burned burgers or forgot to pick up milk, and he started encouraging Leo to say it whenever he felt that hot shame of being wrong creep in.
That night, after Leo left, I tried it with my own 10-year-old daughter, Lila, who was mid-meltdown because she’d doubled the salt instead of the sugar in the chocolate chip cookies she was baking for our family game night. She was yanking the bowl toward the trash can, cheeks pink, when I said, “Hey, what if you try that line Leo told me about today?” She rolled her eyes so hard her whole head moved, but she huffed out, “Fine. Please let me know if I’m wrong, but these are totally ruined.” Just like that, the spiral stopped. She wasn’t locked into “I messed up everything and I’m bad at baking” anymore — she’d opened the door to problem solving. We pulled the dough apart, scraped off the excess salt, added extra flour and sugar, and ended up with cookies that were a little briny but totally edible, and we ate all of them anyway while we played Uno.
What I’ve realized in the month since that first day with Leo is that this tiny phrase isn’t just about being polite. It’s a concrete tool that interrupts the automatic shame most kids pick up pretty much as soon as they start school, where wrong equals bad, wrong equals stupid, wrong means you’re not trying hard enough. Saying the line out loud forces a split second of pause between the mistake and the emotional reaction. It turns a private failure into a shared problem solving exercise, instead of a judgment on who the kid is.
You don’t need to do any big life overhauls to try this, either. The first step is just to model it yourself, all the time, for the small mistakes you make every day. I don’t just mean when you’re doing homework with your kid — I mean when you miss a turn driving, burn the toast, misremember the date of your kid’s field trip. I say “Hmm, I thought the turn was here, please let me know if I’m wrong” to my husband when we’re driving to the grocery store. I say it to Lila when I can’t get her Lego set instructions right. It doesn’t feel forced after a week or so, and it shows kids that adults get things wrong too, and it’s not a big deal.
The second small step is don’t force it when your kid is already too upset. If they’re crying or screaming or crumpling up their work, just sit with them, offer a snack or a minute of quiet, and wait. They’ll use it when they’re ready, and if they don’t that day, that’s okay. No need to turn a small tool into another chore for them to check off. When your kid does say the line, don’t jump straight into correction, either. The concrete response I use is just “Thanks for asking. Let’s check this together.” That keeps it collaborative, instead of me standing over them saying “Yep, you’re wrong, here’s how to fix it.” Half the time, Leo finds his own mistake before I point it out, just because we’re walking through it slow together instead of him waiting for me to confirm he messed up.
It doesn’t work every time, of course. Last week, Leo got a spelling test back with three wrong answers, and he crumpled it up and stuffed it in his backpack and refused to say the line at all, just sat there sniffling. I didn’t push him. We sat and ate a gummy bear and watched a 30 second cat video on my phone, and 10 minutes later he pulled the test back out and mumbled the line on his own. Some days the shame is too big for a 10-word phrase to fix, and that’s fine. It’s not a magic cure for test anxiety or perfectionism. It’s just a small habit that makes being wrong feel a little less lonely.
Yesterday, I heard Lila say it to her friend when they were building a fairy garden in the backyard, and her friend said the bridge they built wouldn’t hold the fairy house. “Okay, please let me know if I’m wrong,” Lila said, “but I think if we add extra sticks under it, it’ll work.” They added the sticks, and it held. It’s not a big grand win. It’s just two kids figuring something out, instead of one of them shutting down because they thought they were wrong. I don’t know if this will stick long term, if it’ll change how they handle big mistakes 10 years from now. But right now, it’s working better than any of the big “teach resilience” tips I’ve read in parenting articles, and it doesn’t take any extra time or money to try.
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