Why Letting Kids Fail Can Be So Difficult for Parents
Failure is a natural part of learning and growth. However, allowing children to make mistakes and experience setbacks often provokes deep resistance in parents. Our instinct is to protect our kids from all hardship - failure feels counter to this parental impulse for comfort and security. However, with support, failure can build character, resilience, and essential life skills in children. Why, then, can letting go and allowing failure be so difficult for parents?
The Parental Instinct to Protect Children from Failure
A fundamental reason is the strong pull parents feel to shield our children from any struggle, big or small. On a primal level, seeing our children hurt or disappointed triggers an intense desire to intervene and make things right again. Failure raises fears that, if unchecked, could spiral into more significant long-term consequences. We worry about damage to self-esteem, future opportunities, or happiness.
In parenting, allowing children to fail within reasonable bounds teaches essential life lessons. When given autonomy to work through challenges, children gain confidence in their problem-solving skills. Parents promote a growth mindset over perfectionism by discussing failures as learning opportunities. With wisdom and patience, we can normalize failure as a natural part of striving, risk-taking, and growth. Every misstep and shortcoming provides a valuable opportunity to build resilience, knowledge, and character. The key is recognizing the learning potential in failure rather than viewing it as confirming inadequacy. A "fail well" mentality unlocks progress.
Learning from Failure: Perspectives from Research and History
As Harvard professor Dr. Amy Edmondson highlights in her book "The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well," framing failures as learning opportunities allow us to extract valuable data from our mistakes rather than viewing them as purely adverse events. Edmondsons' research reinforces that parents and teachers can powerfully shape children's mindsets around failure from a young age. By emphasizing curiosity, resilience, and positivity, we can guide kids to embrace failure as an essential part of the road to success.
Our protective response as parents was necessary historically when existential threats abounded. However, in modern life, relatively small failures pose little actual hazard. Our hard-wired concern easily over-inflates the risks and leads us to over-involvement. This parental instinct contradicts learning to tolerate discomfort and see the upside of failure.
Navigating Societal Pressures and Personal Upbringing
Additionally, societal messaging that pressures kids to excel compounds fears. Parents dread judgment should their child make mistakes or not measure up to standards. Parents often over-identify with their children's performance and see failure as reflecting poorly on their self-worth or capabilities. Letting go challenges parents to separate their children from themselves.
For parents who grew up with little autonomy and in environments that punished failure, allowing kids to fail well requires overcoming their upbringing. Lacking experience and examples of productive failure in childhood makes it harder to take this alternative approach as a parent. Old wounds may also resurface, requiring us to navigate our emotional blockages surrounding failure and decisions we have made.
Fostering Resilience and a Positive Mindset in Children
Children's limited resilience can raise the stakes. Failure accompanied by harsh self-criticism, catastrophic thinking, and giving up presents more cause for worry. However, with empathy, emotional intelligence, modeling perseverance, and reframing challenges as learning opportunities, parents can teach the power of failure to build character.
Of course, difficulties still arise, and failures must be managed and channeled constructively. Nevertheless, allowing children the autonomy to flounder sometimes accelerates their development - with guidance. By understanding the instincts and societal pressures that make letting go hard, parents can thoughtfully overcome discomfort in raising capable, resilient kids. Failure is not fun for parents or children, but often essential for growth.
For parents and teachers, openly discussing failures and mistakes in an encouraging, non-shaming way provides a supportive environment for kids to develop a positive mindset around failing from an early age. When children perceive setbacks and challenges as experiences to learn from rather than indicators that they are incapable, they gain resilience, self-confidence, and willingness to try new things. Praising the effort and learning process rather than just the end results teaches kids the intrinsic value of failure on the road to achievement. Children who can flexibly recover from failure and try again with optimism gain problem-solving abilities, emotional skills, and expanded opportunities - today's failures become seeds of growth and happiness tomorrow.
