Step #2: Let your kids make mistakes
As parents, none of us wants to see our kids get a zero on a late assignment, get a speeding ticket, or explain to a coach why they don’t have their practice equipment.
And yet, when their grade suffers, when they have to pay for the car insurance spike because of that speeding ticket, or when they get benched, they build resilience muscles! A little bit of pain when the stakes are low helps them learn and grow. In fact, if you think about it, there is no way to build those muscles other than using them.
Take a dad who I’ll call Scott. Scott’s daughter often procrastinated on her college assignments – to the point of him expressing regular frustration and logging into her school portal to prod her to get them done. I wonder if letting her fail a class and have to retake it at her own expense would have gotten the point across in a more powerful way.
Perhaps more important: Kids who aren’t allowed to fail also don’t realize their own sense of agency. They feel at the mercy of a confusing world. Experts (for example, see this article in Parents magazine) have found that snowplow-parented kids give up too easily, have poor problem-solving skills, and develop “learned helplessness.”
Eventually, these kids don’t fail because they don’t even try.
Maybe it’s time to let our kids (and ourselves) fail. I recently heard of a family who has a “Mistake Monday” routine. At dinnertime, they talk about mistakes they made the previous week. They remind each other that it’s okay and emphasize having grace. I love that.
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