Why you should let your child fail
When it comes to parenting children, do you also use slow motion and instant replay? Are you aware of your child’s every success or failure? Do you watch each and every step and misstep? Are you busy replaying every move your child makes? Know when to ignore some details and let some things slide to keep a healthy relationship with your children. Your child’s development is not supposed to be a nail-biter. You shouldn’t be sitting at the edge of your seat as they reach their milestones. Relax.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself. -Galileo
When we do something for the child, we might be quieting the voice in our head telling us to help the struggling child, but, at the same time, we are instilling dependence in him. By jumping in to help, we are demonstrating that he is incapable of figuring out the solution to the problem independently. We can offer clues, suggestions, ask probing questions to stimulate a solution, but solving the problem for the child creates dependence.
Another upside to befriending failure early is that you develop a certain knack for the postmortem, a medical term used here to mean a time of examination and reflection. Failure analysis, as they call it in product development circles, is the process of collecting and analyzing all available data to find the cause of a failure and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Is there a more useful skill, or a more capacitating one? Failure analysis, by its very nature, says failure is an event, not an identity and that future outcomes can and will be affected by our choices.
There are two forms of feedback: intrinsic feedback and extrinsic feedback. An example of extrinsic feedback is us saying to our children, “good job,” every so often. As mentioned, this type of feedback creates dependence. An example of intrinsic feedback is letting your child solve a problem on her own and watch for that smile when she “gets it” independently. This type of feedback is based on the child learning how to monitor her own work and depend on her own judgement.
As far as I know, there are no seminars on how to fail. Yet, without failure there is no success. It is important to allow our children to fail and make mistakes in a healthy and supportive manner. No amount of coaching, attending seminars and reading books can substitute for the true benefit of failing, making mistakes, and learning the valuable lessons they teach
