When my older son Jack was in high school, he accepted a summer job selling solar panels door-to-door. My first reaction was to tell him not to do it. I felt protective—afraid of the rejection he would face on doorsteps all summer long. I just couldn’t see how my thoughtful son, a good athlete and straight A student, could cope with so much failure.
As a parent, it’s natural to want to shield your kids from failure. But we often hover over our kids in what are arguably low-stakes situations, inadvertently robbing them of essential learning experiences and causing anxiety rather than the confidence we had intended to build.
Instead, we can learn to let kids fail well.
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To be fair, we are in a bind: if we overprotect, we are ridiculed as helicopter parents, but if we underprotect, we suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences of a child’s immature decision-making. Making the job even harder, every few years the parenting pendulum seems to swing: the three-martini playdate replaces the anxious co-piloted playdate and back again. It’s easy to see why parents are torn: Should you let children make their own mistakes, or stay close by, removing obstacles, limiting risks and preventing failure? Struggling to manage the bind, parents suffer. And so do their kids.
But there is a path forward that avoids either/or thinking and helps kids build good judgment to accompany a learning-oriented, adventuresome spirit. It supports kids in pursuing the right kind of failures—while helping them avoid danger. Extrapolating from my organizational research and personal experience, I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to help children develop the failure muscles they need to stretch and learn and to grow into responsible members of society. To do this, we need to examine two dimensions of failure science: assessing the context for risk and understanding that failures are not all alike.
Consider three kinds of failure I’ve identified in my research: basic, complex and intelligent.
Basic failures have single causes—usually a simple mistake. They are preventable. This is why we childproof our homes when children are small, and ensure that medicine bottles can’t be opened without the strength to twist and pinch. Basic failures don’t bring new knowledge, and most of us would be better off avoiding them (such as by paying attention when we’re following a recipe). But they’re part of the experience for any child learning to master a new topic or skill, and it’s good to remind children to take the time to learn from mistakes, so they can keep improving.
Complex failures have multiple causes—each innocuous on its own—that come together to produce havoc. You forget to charge your cell phone, get stuck behind an overturned truck on the highway, can’t reach your spouse, and miss the day care pick up. Most complex failures can be prevented with vigilance, but we’ve all had days where everything goes wrong, and these kinds of failures will continue to slip through in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. We should learn from them and move on.
The intelligent failures are the ones that matter here, the ones parents should let happen to help children thrive.
It starts with learning to reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development. I believe that most of us, to live the fullest lives, should experience more failures, not fewer. Whether it’s tennis champion Roger Federer winning only 54 percent of the thousands of points he played in his illustrious career (proving that, as he put it, “even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play”) or top chemistry professor Jennifer Heemstra saying that 90 percent of the experiments in her lab end in failure, the most successful among us have long demonstrated that you have to be willing to fail. So why do so many parents feel a need to protect their children from failure?
Remember Jack and the solar panels? My instinct was to dissuade him. Yes, most people said no, and some were downright rude, but a few said yes, leaving him with a sense of pride that he’d brought renewable energy to some of our area’s homes. Meanwhile, he learned to pause after each rejection and tell himself that a no was simply a step toward the next yes. He built some healthy failure muscles that continue to serve him well in his career.
Failures can help kids succeed. To do this, we need to encourage them to take thoughtful risks—to keep stretching outside their comfort zone. Audition for the school play; try out for basketball; ask that classmate out on a date. Yes, rejection is a likely outcome for any of these small life risks. But this is a feature, not a bug. The most successful people are those who’ve learned how to fail: they’ve missed more crucial shots on court, been turned down for more auditions, and had more papers rejected from top journals. Their success comes from trying, learning, improving and trying again—not from magically getting things right the first time around.
It can be hard to watch your kids fail. You absorb their disappointment. You want to fix whatever went wrong quickly, so they can feel good again. But part of making this work is learning to live with your discomfort, your anxiety about them missing the short-term gain over the long-term lesson.
Give your kids space to fail in contained, safe ways, and teach them to embrace and learn from the failures they experience. Show them how to face forward and go after the next challenge with renewed insight and energy. Don’t dwell on failures but do learn as much as you can from them.
This mindset—what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset—is an invaluable resource for children, particularly in a fast-changing world. When my younger son Nick, learning to ski at about age eight, asked me to watch him come down the slope, I dutifully stood at the bottom and waited. After his short run, he looked up and asked, “How did I do?” My response? “You did great!” But instead of the smile I’d expected, Nick looked puzzled, even disappointed, as he replied, “Can’t you tell me what I did wrong so I can get better?”
Now I was the one smiling. Somehow, as a parent, I had helped nurture this growth mindset. Intimately familiar with Dweck’s research as a social psychologist myself, I should have commented on his process (“You were in control of your speed, and you looked like you were enjoying yourself. If you bend your knees a little more and keep your chest facing downhill, your form will be better”) rather than praising his results (“You did great!”). I had been trying to teach my children not to overvalue successful outcomes, so they could focus instead on building disciplined habits of learning. And Nick showed me that what I was trying to do was working. This doesn’t mean we don’t ever say, “Good job!” of course, but praising outcomes isn’t the only thing that can motivate a child. Worse, when we only praise outcomes, it teaches kids to be risk averse—reluctant to come up short in your and others’ eyes. “Good try!” or “Great progress!” are the kinds of process-focused phrases that offer encouragement without creating a dependence on getting things right every time.
What can be remarkable about an intelligent failure is that it shuts down one path and forces us to seek another, as with the time I was rejected from my high school basketball team and discovered debating instead. Other times they take us a notch closer to our goal, in slow but steady progress toward mastery. Although intelligent failures include wildly different phenomena from a missed point on the tennis court to rejection from the college of our choice, they have in common the pursuit of goals we care about. They also require taking the time to think through what is known and not known before acting. Also, the stakes are kept appropriately small, deliberately not incurring undue financial, reputational or safety risks.
In sum, to learn to take the intelligence of intelligence failure to heart, parents must consider both the context and the type of failure that may result from their kids’ decisions. With this awareness, we can appreciate the emotional, cognitive and interpersonal skills the kids need to aim high, stretch their potential and become resilient—rather than fearful or ashamed of failing. In this way, parents can help their children build strong failure muscles while saving them from disastrous mistakes.
How do you start? Stop yourself from reactively protecting your child from failure. Notice your instincts, which, while valuable in so many contexts, are not helpful in others. Ask yourself, “What is the risk here? What kind of failure would this be?” to help you override your instinct to shield children from life’s most valuable lessons. Encourage them to take smart risks. Create (and help them create) opportunities to stretch. Support their growth as they do so, while helping them think through the possible outcomes of choices they are considering.
Then let them choose.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
