Eliminate “Failure” and Encourage Learning

Helping your children to be resilient is probably the greatest skill you can teach. Allowing your children to “fail” will help them grow. But the whole concept of failure isn’t particularly helpful. If you try, you either succeed or you learn something. Think about it. How powerful is the ability to try and try again? We finally develop a cure for a disease after decades of trial and discovery. Or that local ball team that you thought would never make the playoffs keeps trying until they break through. It’s not failure if you learn something—even if what you learned is that a given approach didn’t work.

Getting a D on a math test presents an opportunity to learn something: How would you go about studying differently? Who could help you? Why did you think you were ready for that test? Parents all too often want perfection. Perfection is a lousy way to live your life, and it kills resilience.

We all want our children to grow into happy, positive adults. The world our children and grandchildren will grow up in is changing exponentially faster than when we grew up. We have been told our kids will have multiple jobs over the course of their lives. It’s critical to teach your children to be adaptive, resilient, resourceful, and open to learning, changing, and understanding that we all get “do-overs.” You learn far more from things that didn’t work out than from all those that came too easily.