That’s one of Megan McArdle’s big themes, as she blogs and especially in her new book that I’m partway through (and will blog about when I’m done): failing, and learning from your failure, enables you to truly succeed, in a way that being insulated from failure doesn’t. A couple weeks ago, she wrote “Go ahead, let your kids fail.” And I just spent last night, and this morning, making sure my 5th grader did NOT fail — that is, taking him through the library and walking him through writing his 5-paragraph essay.
As a parent, it’s far from clear when to let your kid fail and when to help them along the way, and I tried to coach him when he wanted to just have me dictate the content, but I also did a fair amount of pointing him to pages in the book with the content he needed, providing the historical background (the paper was on the Parthenon, his self-chosen topic, and I gave him some of the context on ancient Greece). And I felt somewhat justified in that, this year, his teacher (who is, honestly, overdue for retirement) is rather disorganized. When my older son had to write a paper for the first time, the teacher walked him through notecards, and sources, and works cited, but my middle son got none of that. (We’ve decided at this point that we just have to wait it out, since the other subjects are going fine.)
I don’t want to be a helicopter parent — and I don’t think I am. My kids are too young, yet, for us to be calling admissions offices on their behalf, or talking to their professors about their grades, or even founding charities for them or pouring money into the sorts of activities that catch the eye of universities. And really, I have no expectation of them going to the top-ranked schools, or competing for the big scholarships.
Instead, we’re stuck, with my middle son anyway, with more mundane issues such as “how do you ensure he gets his homework done?” And our successes are small ones, like the fact that he is, for the moment, of his own will, keeping his dirty clothes in the hamper rather than all over the floor. And we soldier on.
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