Powerful Failure

I believe in the power of failure as the world’s greatest teacher.  Not enough young people experience true failure, failure of their own making, failure from their own shortcomings.  Young folks don’t experience healthy failure any more simply because of the protection deliberately afforded them by adults:  parents and educators.

While well-meaning, parents bend over backward to protect their kids from perceived and real failure.  The score isn’t kept at little kids soccer or t-ball games. Everyone gets a participation trophy at the end of every pee-wee sports season.  Parents work too hard on their children’s homework and make excuses for why students aren’t measuring up, “Oh, that’s my fault; I didn’t get him up early enough.”  “I’m sorry, I didn’t remind her to do her homework,” when what they should be doing is telling Junior that when he or she is late to school or with an assignment, there are natural consequences.  It’s simple logic. If Junior has to stay after school or his grade drops, perhaps he will make sure he’s up on time or getting her assignment in. It’s not mean; it’s just real.

We in education are no better.  We bend over backward getting students to just “pass” classes.  We work so hard and offer so much assistance and multiple chances so that they can earn that D- when what we should be doing is letting them fail.  That’s right. Flunk the class. What’s a slew of D-’s going to do for a student anyway? It’s far better to fail at this stage of the game than to delay the learning that comes with failure until later when the stakes are much higher. The military doesn’t give endless chances to get it right.  Colleges don’t. Certainly, employers and industries don’t either. And neither do most relationships.

When students experience failure at a younger age, in a natural way, they learn how to bounce back.  That’s resilience. They figure out how to get up and move forward. They recognize their weaknesses and strengths and can operate accordingly in the future.  This is a powerful intrinsic learning experience. When these students learn to accept failures and how to turn them around, they are teaching themselves the grit they will need later on in their lives.  

Standing between young people and defeat delays genuine failure to times when the consequences are too great.  We need to let kids stumble and fall when there is a healthy safety net, when they’re practicing in an environment surrounded by support systems of important adults in their lives (parents, teachers, family members, church leaders, coaches, sponsors) who teach them how to address failure, not find ways to prevent or excuse it.  If they never have that practice, what happens when they fail outside of all that prevention that was cloaked as protection?  The stakes are too high then and they may not be able to hold a job, persevere in difficult classes or training programs, function independently outside of the orb of their parents’ influence.  We need to destigmatize failure. We don’t need to downplay the importance of success or diminish the consequences of failure, but we need to reframe the experience and let young people own it.   

While embarrassing, failure is not shameful.  It’s a natural part of developing as a person with grit and resilience.  I still fail at things all the time. You’ll find my lesson plans littered with post-lesson comments like “Nope” and “Didn’t work,” even “Disastrous.”  I use these failures to drive me forward and to craft better lessons. When I fail miserably with a parent--lose my cool, take something personally--I may be embarrassed, but I’m not ashamed and I know I’m human and will do better the next time I’m faced with a similar situation.

The bottom line is that when we, as adults, stand between young people and failure, we are doing them a great disservice, and we hurting them.  It’s time that adult stop preventing kids from failing, but rather help them navigate through their failures instead.

Bragging Rights

I’ve always been slightly jealous of my children’s pride in their father’s childhood in New York.  His stories made it seem so exotic and they were fascinated by his tales of NYC in the 1950s. Hey, my family were homesteaders, they lived in freaking sod houses and broke the land and settled virgin country, for God’s sake.  Those things somehow never measured up to New Years in Times Square or swimming all summer in the Atlantic Ocean. My childhood in Minnesota and the northern plains growing up around skiing and skating, lakes and fishing should have seemed ideal to outdoor oriented children like ours who loved camping and playing outside like kids from a different generation.  Yet, my Minnesota stories somehow trailed off in the telling to an increasingly indifferent audience. “Daddy, tell us about Big Ma, the bootlegger again,” they’d clamor as I tried one more time to glamorize how my grandmother ran the post office in Charbonneau, North Dakota. . .  This strange competitiveness with my husband for who-had-the-coolest-childhood afforded me one of my most embarrassing moments of mothering. Ironically enough, it occured at a beloved lake.

It was on one of dozens of camping trips we took to Gull Point State Park in Okoboji, Iowa with our young children and grandchildren.  This campground, its accompanying trails, playground, and beach were fixtures in our children’s summer adventures. This trip was no different.  On this particular summer afternoon, the sun glinted off the calm lake water as I stood on the beach surveying the kids playing. I could feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my shoulders as shouts of swimmers echoed off the trees along the bank behind me.  I looked down, wiggled my toes in the cool perfectly clear glacier formed West Lake Okoboji, the sand squishing up between my toes.

Tyler, Ellie and Nicholas stood nearly chest deep in the water in this protected inlet, and I soon could see that they were trying to skip rocks.  This was a losing prospect. It is nearly impossible to skip rocks from that depth. The angle is all wrong. To adequately skip a rock even one skip, the plane surface of a pancake thin rock must smash flatly on the water’s surface to make it bounce.  This demands a special sideways flick of the wrist that sends the flattened stone skimming above and then along the water.  These kids were clueless.

“Let Mommy show you how to skip rocks,” I said grandiloquently to Nicholas.  I unnecessarily reminded Tyler and Ellie, “Grandma grew up in Minnesota. I know how to do this.”  I approached them, and Nick handed me a perfectly shaped and sized rock for skipping. I stood closer to the shore illustrating that they couldn’t be so deep into the lake and achieve the appropriate angle.  I held the rock between my thumb and index finger in my right hand, cocked my arm out at the elbow, then quickly snapped my arm and wrist chucking the rock as hard as I could directly into Nick’s face.

He dropped like a 50-pound sack of potatoes into the water then bobbed up screaming and sputtering lake water, his hand over his eye.  Tyler squealed in delight and Ellie began to cry. I rushed to him as fast as I could flailing through the water, cupped my left hand behind his head and clapped my right hand over his mouth as we now had drawn the attention of all the other beach goers.  “SHHHHHHH” I said as I pulled his hand down to make sure he still had two eyeballs. It was fine. An angry red welt was forming under his left eye, but it’s not like the skin was cut or anything. Geez.  Calm down. I looked furtively left and right over my shoulders, hoping no one had witnessed by mother-of-the-year nomination ending behavior.

I’m not proud of this reaction where I was more concerned for my public embarrassment than my child potentially losing an eye, but, the reaction was genuine, and the regret has served as a reminder of my hubris on a couple of different levels.  I needed to learn to let go of the competitiveness with my husband--just let it go, if not for my own well-being, then for the safety of my children! Clearly, it was time to quit worrying about who was scoring more points with the kids with their legacy stories.  So I did just that; I quit thinking about it.

My son came to me recently stewing over designs for an addition to one of his tattoos, an addition he wanted to thoughtfully incorporate all aspects of his own personal background, including me, and my side of his family.  It reminded me again that my children are their own people made up of their own experiences from their individual childhoods.  My husband’s and mine are largely irrelevant to the memories they will share with their own children down the road.  So it turns out that my big mistake wasn’t the rock to my son’s face; it was obsessing over and competing for the best childhood.  Still, I can hope that among the stories my son shares with his own children some day will be the one of his dangerously reckless mother nearly putting his eye out, teaching him how to skip rocks.