“Seeking the Courage to Allow My Children to Fail”
There’s nothing pleasant about experiencing failure. It can single us out in a room full of people, or, uproot us from our most secretive hiding places. It kicks us when we’re down, and shows us no mercy in our attempts to stand back up. Singular in purpose, our biggest failures are capable of pursuing us years after leaving their indelible first marks. Uncompromising. Relentless. The perfect hunters. Like a shiver of sharks advancing through the open water.
Failure forces us to reflect on one of life’s most essential questions: What did I learn?
If you could go back to change something from your past, and rewrite any number of your perceived failures, would you? Better yet, should you? Unfortunately (or fortunately), life doesn’t work that way. The world moves in one direction. It’s never easy to pick through the pieces of what might have been, but if we can have the courage to face up to our shortcomings by examining them through the looking glass of self-reflection, we’ll recognize an indispensable truth: figuring out what doesn’t work is just as important as discovering what does.
As parents, our natural instinct is to want to shield our children from failure. It’s also an improper one.
There are fundamental roles that we play in the lives of our children. We provide for their basic needs. We protect them from danger. We teach them right from wrong. Consider that last one for a moment. Teacher. If we are to believe that our experiences have a purpose behind them, and are meant to build upon each other, then we need to be careful about how often we attempt to mediate conflict within our kids’ lives. The truth about failure is that it prepares us for future events, and provides us the opportunity to use the lessons from our past as our greatest weapons in pursuit of future goals.
Talk to your kids about the value of struggle, the acceptance of imperfection, and the teachings of failure…including your own.
Kids look up to their moms and dads. They view us like Wonder Woman and Superman (especially in our house!). We live in the Age of Information, where expert advice and resources are a finger click away. We try our best to be good parents. We might even try a little too hard sometimes. We don’t want to give our kids unrealistic beliefs that the world comes easy for us, or, that we, as their most influential mentors have never experienced struggle. For that reason, I think it’s healthy and helpful to talk with them about the times when we’ve fallen short of achieving our goals. We obviously don’t need to pour out our entire life story, but by giving them real-life examples of the adversity we’ve encountered, and showing them that it’s okay to display vulnerability, it will help them relate to us, and reinforce to them that we’re human.
Stepping back and allowing our children to fall down is only half the challenge. The true test of our resolve is allowing them to stand up on their own.
A face-plant onto the sidewalk. A nose dive off the monkey bars. An ill-timed launch off the swing set. These are some of the earliest “fall down, get back up again” scenarios that our kids experience. Over the years I’ve witnessed enough parent reactions (including my own) to playtime accidents to make this observation: our children notice our stress levels when we respond to their states of emotional disturbance, and they react accordingly. The reason I bring this up is to illustrate the point that our kids are like sponges. If part of our objective, as parents, is to instill a sense of resiliency in them, then we need to be resolute ourselves. Our natural reaction may not always be to display calmness, but the challenge of rising up after falling down isn’t going to end at the playground, not for them or for us. As our kids get older, the faces of adversity they’ll encounter are going to reappear in ever-changing forms. If we don’t make the effort to do our part from the earliest stages, and lead by modeling our behavior to reflect the types of responses we want them to demonstrate during times of distress, then we must ask ourselves: at what point do we start?
A blessing and a curse: older siblings help teach their younger siblings how to fail.
We have two children. An older boy and a younger girl. There’s a 4-year age gap, 40-pound weight difference, and 12-inch height differential between them. Our daughter looks up to her big brother. She adores and wants to be just like him. She also wants to do whatever he’s doing, and to do it just as capably as him. Right now. Of course, this can lead to problems. I watch them race each other along the sidewalk in front of our house, roller skate together through our dining room and kitchen, and challenge each other with intricately-designed obstacle courses at the park across the street. Yes, there can be drama, but there are also precious moments. She’s learned a lot from him over the years. Maybe more than she has from anyone. She’ll never stop trying to keep up with him, and as the younger sibling, she’ll always have the advantage of learning from his successes and failures, just like her own.
Don’t overlook the value of sports. They teach our kids a lot more than physical fitness.
Participation in sports gets our kids moving while providing them a healthy outlet for social engagement. It supports learning in an atmosphere that’s fun, promotes community involvement, and encourages team building. Through continued practice our kids can grow in their abilities, which will support goal setting. Success and failure are certainly part of the journey for any athlete. If our kids are lucky, they’ll continue long enough to experience some of both. One of my favorite athletes of all time is Michael Jordan. For those of us who witnessed his excellence on the basketball court, we remember a relentless competitor, and a man who is widely regarded as being one of, if not the greatest basketball player of all time. A six-time NBA champion, he’s the personification of “winning” in sports. As it turns out, he also has an incredibly insightful viewpoint about failure: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Until next time everyone!
- Todd
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