Should We Allow Failure?

By Troy L Parrish, MA LCPC

Should we protect our children from experiencing failure?  Should we work to ensure that they succeed at any endeavor?  This issue is becoming more relevant as the competition for enrollment in good schools and high paying jobs have created pressure on parents and subsequently children to be successful all the time, to avoid failure at almost any cost.  Talk to any high school guidance counselor or judicial officer at a major university and you will quickly discover the lengths individuals and their parents will go to in order to advert the potential of failure.
        Of course we have seen the more ridiculous attempts to spare children the ego damaging experience of failure, including not keeping score at sporting events and not assigning grades for school.  What we fail to often see is the more insidious efforts to advert failure made by parents.  This is almost always attached to activities that are in some way attached to the child's future prospects of getting into a good college or positioning them for a good job.  The amount of effort that will go into getting extra coaching, talking to and cajoling coaches and staff, talking to administrators in order to make sure their child is not removed from a team or is accepted to a team.  The hours spent pushing a child to do homework or to study or even worse the amount of energy and effort a parent puts into the actual work itself is evidence of the mounting pressure parents feel to make sure that their child does not fail.  Let's face it, sometimes the grade given for a project or paper is grade that the parent earned as much as the student.  The consequences of failure seem too great to overcome, hence the intense effort to avoid that failure.
        But is this effort to avoid failure always helpful, is it always in the best interest of the child that we insulate them from this type of experience?  I believe that the resounding answer is NO!  Why, you may ask, if it is my power to keep my child from failing should I allow them to suffer the pain or difficulty of failure?  Because there is much to be learned and gained from failing.  Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric light bulb, stated concerning his efforts to create the light bulb "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" and John Dewey the founder of the Dewey decimal system that libraries use to catalogue books stated " Failure is instructive.  The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his success."  These men recognized that failure was a valuable a teacher as much as success, and used properly failure can be a tremendous motivator.  These men from their failures learned what did not work and would approach the problem a different way.  The majority of discoveries and inventions we enjoy today are the results of people persisting in the face of failure and learning what did not work in order to discover what did work.  This is a wonder built in teacher that nature provides to us all and we can use it or try to avoid it. 
We must also recognize that we cannot control the actions and attitudes of other people.  Parents often are attempting get their children to take care of their responsibilities by pushing and assisting, but this can lead to a situation in which the only motivation is coming from mom or dad and not from the child.  The older the child becomes the more dangerous this situation becomes.
        To illustrate this point, imagine that a child is failing to produce sufficient effort to get through the seventh grade.  The parents have set up clear limits for the completion of homework, there has been some discipline around the issue, they have met with school officials and they have spent countless nights and weekends wrestling with their child to get a project or homework done.  There is mounting pressure coming from the school to "help" their child in order to avert failure.  The school is also under pressure because of increasing measures that suggest that when students fail the school is not doing its job.  The only one not feeling some internal anxiety concerning this situation is the child themselves!  Now if the parents succeed in pushing this child through the seventh grade, then the eighth grade and so on, at what point is the child's ability to avoid and resist greater than the ability of the adults in the situation.  Or do we successfully get this child through high school only to see them struggle in college where it is very difficult to be of assistance and there is far less support.  Or do we manage to push them through college then see them struggle with adversity as adults because of motivational problems.  When our children become adults the cost of failure becomes far more significant than when they are in the seventh grade.  You can conclude from this illustration that in the case of this child it would have been far better to fail in the seventh grade and deal with the consequences than to have to recover from significant failure as an adult where recovery is far more difficult.
        Does this mean that we should not help our children when they are struggling with something?  Of course not, but what we must attempt to do is recognize that at times it will be important simply to allow our children to fail at something in order to grow accustomed to failure.  Don't let your child win at a game every time, this is just not realistic.  Allow them to win enough to be encouraged and want to try, but not every time.  Should you allow your child to fail at something more important, such as a sports team, music or even school?  Answer the following questions?
1.         Have you provided all the support available to you and your child?
2.        Have you made sure that their ability has been fully assessed and that any necessary accommodations are being provided (for physical or learning disabilities)?
3.        Has the appropriate structure and discipline been applied?
4.        Is the problem more motivational than any other issue?
If the answer to these questions is yes each time, then it may be advisable that you allow your child to fail, but only you can decide.  The point of this article is to demonstrate that not only is failure OK, it can even be helpful in dealing with preparing our children for their futures.  As Mickey Rooney said, "you always pass failure on the way to success."