How To Raise A (Successful) Failure

Resilience—not Letting Setbacks Destroy You, Learning From Them, trying Again—is One Of Life’s Great Skills. This Is How You Teach It.

- Jennifer King Lindley

IT WAS THE EVE OF the sixth-grade science fair. Having dawdled until the deadline, my son, Ethan, had whipped together a seriously lame experiment: measuring the weight of a banana before and after it dried out. Every maternal atom in me thrummed with ideas for making “Banana Water” less bad. “How about you test several different fruits and compare? Or maybe a nice avocado?” I enthused. Ethan was unmoved: “Just bananas. It’s easier.” I watched him blow-dry the lone browning fruit and shrugged. On science fair night, at tables nearby, atoms were being split, obscure diseases cured. Ethan, looking uncomfortable under the glaring gymnasium lights, got only the thinnest, most polite grandparent traffic and—surprise!— earned a deservedly lackluster grade. “Maybe some grapes would have helped,” he admitted on the subdued car ride home.

I now realize Ethan got to experience something that is increasingly rare for kids: what it’s like to just plain screw up. Our youngsters have been called a “failure-deprived generation”— famously blamed on helicopter parents, lawn-mower parents, snowplow parents, and other heavy- machinery types who swoop in to bawl out coaches and wheedle better grades. Jessica Lahey, the author of The Gift of Failure, has been an English teacher for 20 years and has watched her students become increasingly uncomfortable with taking risks. Lahey says this avoidance can be fostered by parents with even the best intentions: “It’s painful to watch your child stumble. You want to show your love by making a problem instantly better. But we need to look beyond the immediate emergency and take a longer view: ‘How can this help my kid grow from life’s many setbacks while I’m here to help?’”.