Should I let my child fail?

Your child is struggling in algebra, avoiding their summer reading, skipping all of their baseball practices, blowing off friends.  The writing is on the wall.  Failure is coming their way and you know that it’s going to be so painful.  When do you step in with reminders, prompts, and extra help that your child hasn’t requested?  When do you let your child fail?  

When failure is safe but scary  

In my work as a therapist, I’ve worked with many kids facing future failures.   Parents often bring their children to therapy because they see failure on the horizon.  

“My child is not going to pass algebra class.  He is refusing to go to tutoring and he doesn’t study.   I offer to help and he pushes me away!  Help!  Can you get him to understand how important his GPA is for college?”

Your child actually knows all of this, assuming he or she is a normally developing middle schooler or high schooler.  Often, the more the parent pushes, the more the child pushes back.  As our kids enter pre adolescence and adolescence, they are wired to seek autonomy from their parents.  Sometimes this looks like pushing back against parents’ suggestions.  Much of my work with these families is making sure parents can tolerate the distress of watching their child fail.  

Be the reserve parachute   

Parents often want to prevent the failure.  Look, this makes sense!  You love your kid and watching them get an F on a report card that might impact them later in life – it’s so hard.  In addition, you might be worried about judgment from the school, whether your child will be allowed to play sports, or how they might feel about themselves knowing they failed.  These instincts to protect are hard wired into your DNA as a parent.  

As parents, we are always assessing for safety.  Ask yourself honestly, is my child in danger with this failure?  If you have to go three to four steps down the road to find the danger, then the risk is low.  If they are in eminent danger, such as getting the car with a drunk driver, by all means, don’t let them do it!  But if the danger is a lower GPA that might affect college options which might affect career which might affect income, this isn’t imminent danger.  That isn’t to say that these things aren’t important, just that there are a lot of factors at play with these concerns.  

Rather than stepping in as the parachute for your child, be the reserve parachute.  When their parachute has failed, and they are about to crash and burn, you can step in to prevent catastrophe.  Your job here is to ensure a safe landing, not to take away any discomfort!  Read on to learn how to be the reserve parachute.  

How to help your child fail safely 

Being the reserve parachute means that you deploy only when needed.  And most often, only when asked by the skydiver!  If your child comes home with a failing grade, they are still safe and can recover from this.  However, if they’re distressed about that grade and asking for help, now they’ve asked for the reserve parachute.  Kids don’t always ask for help in the healthiest ways but you can worry about that lesson later.  This is a great time to say, “OK.  This mistake feels bad.  But we can recover.  What steps do you want to take to bring your grade up?  How can I help?”

The reserve parachute is NOT the main parachute.  It’s not pretty.  It doesn’t glide your child in gently to the ground.   It’s there for emergencies.  For parents, this means stepping in only when truly needed and doing it in a way that feels helpful to your child.  If you tell them how to do that, you take away the opportunity for your child to develop competency.  They get the message, “I’m a failure so I better let my mom or dad make all the decisions now.”  Instead, we want them to get the message, “I messed up here but I can fix it and I have a support system to get me there. 

What happens to kids whose parents are always the parachute?

When you step in as the parachute for your child, you send a message to your child that you don’t trust them and you don’t think they can handle this on their own.  When this happens over and over again, children and teens begin to lose faith in their own competence.  “I can’t handle it.  I can’t do this without my mom/dad.”  A sense of competency doesn’t come from always succeeding, it comes from struggling and finding your way. 

Kids with low sense of self-competence often develop anxiety.  When faced with a challenge on their own, they aren’t sure they can handle it.  For many young people this really intensifies when they go away to college and parents are there to be the parachute.  For others, it can be a peer issue that a parents’ involvement would be too strange or inappropriate.  Suddenly, they question their ability to manage on their own because they’ve never had to overcome a struggle without help.

We never want to abandon our children in their struggles.  They should always know that they have a safe place to land, or a reserve parachute to come in and help them figure out how to try again.   However, we also need to ensure that our kids know we believe in them and that we’re confident in their problem solving abilities.  

What if my child already failed or already has a low sense of self competence.  

Child therapy and teen therapy are great tools to build self competence and help children overcome failures.  It’s never too late to change how we approach these problems and to develop new skills.  Skylands Wellness provides child therapy and teen therapy in Ledgewood (Morris County), NJ; Newton (Sussex County), NJ and virtually throughout NJ and PA.  Combining our experience with family systems therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, we can help your child develop a sense of competence, overcome failures, and build lasting healthy relationships with you.  If you’re looking for an expert child therapist or teen therapist, please call us today for a free 15 minute phone consultation.  Click these link to learn more about child therapy or teen therapy.