As our children make mistakes, gain a new perspective on letting them fail.
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Welcome to the Be Your Best Self Blog by Marsha Abbott.
"Should We?"
You are sitting on the sidelines of the runway. Your child is loading up into a Cessna 182 jump plane right in front of you. They take off and travel those 12,000 feet into the air, preparing for the next steps. You worry about your sweet child being up there, all alone – with just the pilot, their parachute sack, and that cold, metal floor beneath them. You know what is going to happen next. That part is easy. Your precious child is going to jump. But here is the part you aren’t sure of. Here is the part that scares you the most. What if their parachute doesn’t open? What if your child jumps out of that plane and has no safety net to catch them?
The fear is too great! So, you run back to the building as fast as you can to see if someone can stop that plane! You try to find a way to radio to your child to come back to ground level and to forget the whole thing. As a parent, you do everything in your power to stop them from the one thing that frightens you the most. The one thing that you are certain will ruin their life.
That is what all of us parents would do in this situation. But the real question is…Should we? Should we stop them from jumping? Will it end up ruining or ending their life?
I am about to say these next words that will make you believe I am a bad parent. But I am going to say them anyway…I don’t think we should. I believe we should just let them jump!
There, I said it. The one thing a parent should never say. So let me explain why I feel this way, and let’s see if you agree.
It’s my son’s sophomore year in a very large high school. As first semester is nearing its end, I must admit it was a tough first half. The fall season brought into our house every one of the illnesses going around in our community. Most of us got sick with something every single month for the first 4 months of school. And missing 3-4 days a week each month is not an easy thing to come back from. Then to top it all off, we learned that through some miscommunication within the school, it wasn’t until first conferences that my son’s teachers learned of his dyslexia and his recommended accommodations that go along with it. So you can probably guess what happened next, his grades slipped…and I don’t just mean a little bit. It was frustrating and pretty clear that my son was diving very quickly into failure…with no safety net below.
So as his parent, I had a choice to make. I needed to decide if I was going to jump in and save the day, or if I was going to let him figure it out…parachute or no parachute. And in turn, experience the failure that would most certainly come along with it.
Because let’s face it, I had lots of excuses to share with the school. I could have made a detailed outline…point by point…of exactly why my son wasn’t doing so well this first semester. And I could have very easily put the fault on his teachers for not giving him the accommodations he needed from the very beginning. It would be so easy to do. And all of my son’s problems would just disappear.
How many times have you made excuses for your child and their lackluster behavior? How often do you catch yourself blaming someone else for the faults in their life? Especially by putting the blame on their teachers for their grades or performance? And when you do these things, do you do everything in your power to change it? To find a way to get them out of it? And more importantly, should you do that?
Because let’s be honest here…this is exactly what society is teaching us to do. Participation awards for everyone! There are never losers, only winners! If our children have a problem, if they lose something, if they faulter in any way…it’s not their fault! And It’s never their mistake! (Sound familiar?)
And parents, I hate to say it, but we aren’t helping. Society has led us to believe that if our children fail, if they mess it up...it’s our fault. We then have to face the reality that our children aren’t perfect which can be a hard thing to admit in the world we live in today. And the fear that comes along with all of these emotions is sometimes too great for us to live with. So what do we do? We jump in to save the day and to fix it; to be 100% certain that failure is not imminent and that their life will not be ruined. We give the world this perception that our children really are perfect, and it’s someone else’s imperfections that have caused them to mess up. So we make sure that their parachute opens with nothing but success. Or better yet, we step in and don’t let them jump from the start.
Because let’s be real - our children will fail and fail badly at that! Every single one of them are going to do it. It’s just a matter of time.
So let’s think about this in a different way: What if, in those situations, we take a step back and just see what happens? What if we didn’t save the day after all? What if, instead, we chose to guide our children to make better choices and then hope that they will find their own and better way all on their own? What would this, in turn, look like?
Perhaps they will take their failure, learn from it, and figure out a way to do better. More than likely, our children will learn that disappointment, imperfections, and losing are a normal part of life…and that really is okay. And hopefully, our children will figure out what it means to take responsibility for their own actions, to say sorry when it needs to be said…instead of turning the blame to everyone else in their life. If we could teach our children these lessons, will it ruin them? Will it end their life like we tend to believe? For me, I believe it will do the exact opposite. I believe these lessons will be invaluable to them as they grow up and are forced to figure things out on their own.
So yes, I had some choices to make when it came to my son’s first semester of his sophomore year in high school. And here is the part I didn’t mention before…
I was certain the many illnesses he contracted affected his work. And I knew he didn’t have every accommodation that he needed. BUT I also knew that his effort could have doubled from where it stood in that moment. So I chose to allow him no excuses for his grades. I decided to teach him a life lesson that unexpected things can happen and that working hard and planning ahead are an important part of life. And I absolutely chose not to blame the school or his teachers for any of it. While some of those things had a contributing factor, ultimately it was my son’s responsibility to put in the effort and to ask for the help he needed to get his grades where they should be. And he chose not to. So parachute or no parachute, I decided to let him live with that choice…whether he was going to succeed or fail by semester’s end.
We want to do everything in our power to save our children from failure…But should we? And while these next words might make me sound like a bad parent, I am going to say them anyway…
Let them fail. Let them fall. Let them learn. There, I said it…again.
*For those of you struggling with something in life or have a topic of interest that you want me to talk about in this blog, email me at BeYourBestSelfBlog@gmail.com. Let’s work together to Be Our Best Selves!