Free to fail

 Free to Fail

Would you let your child run out in front of a moving vehicle?  Probably not.  But would you let your child fail a school?  How far should teachers and parents go in letting kids fail?  How much will you complain if a child is not doing well at school?

Every good teacher knows we learn more about how a child learns when he/she fails at something than when they get the question correct.  Why is that?  Because when we fail, we can figure  out why we failed.  But when we succeed we don’t take the effort to figure out why and often we can succeed for the wrong reasons.

Children (and adults) need to fail to improve learning.  The trick is to figure out  how much failure is encouraging and how much is discouraging to the point of believing we can’t do something.  In essence we are looking for the Goldilocks spot where we get it just right.

Is doing the best a child can do good enough for success.  Maybe, but not always.  In the real road of life, excuses are not going to be made for a child because he or she has a disability.  In fact, quite the contrary is true. If a child has a disability that child may have to work harder to get a job than the plain kid who doesn’t have a disability even though both individuals may be able to do the job equally well.  Trying out for a team or interviewing for a job, doing the best one can do will not necessarily bring home the victory.

Children need to be allowed to fail.  Neither parents nor teachers should jump in and rescue a child before he or she is allowed to fail.  Resilience is a critical life skill.  The road of anyone’s life is going to have some potholes.  A child needs to be prepared for that road.  Parents and teachers are not going to be able to run ahead filling in those potholes.

Antifragile teaching and parenting is about allowing kids to explore and fail at age appropriate tasks. Otherwise, kids become fragile adults, falling into those potholes.  It’s about intervening to teach the child how to do the task him or herself, not running ahead and doing the task for the child or removing the reason for failing.  Intervening to make sure your kid gets a job or is admitted to a school that is not merited is ultimately setting the child up for failure.  

Jumping in when tasks are too hard rather than allowing the child to have a reasonable struggle and enjoy the glow of having achieved something hard is not only better for the child now but better for the adult the child will become.

Both teachers and parents want kids to believe in themselves.  That isn’t going to happen if they are never given a chance to earn their success  and, thereby, have a reason to believe.  Free to fail is the price of success.