How to Teach Our Children to Fail

“I’m less interested in the big successes. People don’t learn a lot from their successes, and they usually learn the wrong things.”

That’s what Jim Spohrer, a computer scientist who leads IBM’s university partnerships told me for my new book, There Is Life After College, coming out in April.

Sphorer said that he likes to hire people from start-ups rather than right out of universities because they have experienced failure and learned from it.

Students rarely see good models of failure in their daily lives to emulate because parents and teachers often hide their mistakes. Students are never exposed, for instance, to the feedback process that is the hallmark of most jobs today. In the college classroom, the sole focus of students is on the final product, whether an exam or a final paper.

But how do we teach failure? That’s the challenge Jessica Lahey, a middle school teacher, tackles in her new book, The Gift of Failure. It should be required reading for all parents who try to protect their children from failure. As Lahey writes in the book, “failures that happen out there, in the real world, carry far higher stakes."

As both a parent of young kids and a higher-education writer who hears all the time that college graduates are not prepared for the failures of the real world, I wanted to ask Jessica how parents and teachers can better teach the value of failing in students. I recently caught up with Jessica and my exchange with her follows:

Q. As a father of two young girls (six and four), I took your advice on failure to heart. But you’re a middle school teacher. How early and how much should we introduce this idea of failure to our children?

A. Little kids need to be given opportunities to self-advocate from a very early age. Kindergarten teachers told me over and over about students who come to school with their parents and act as if they can’t ask adults questions, and speak in a helpless, high-pitched voice, only to switch into their teacher-enforced “big kid voice” as soon as the parents leave. They revert to that helpless voice as soon as their parents show up at the end of the day, of course.

If we teach kids to look other people in the eye, speak up for themselves, and tell people what they need and want, we take a huge step toward teaching autonomy. Plus, little kids can do far more than we give them credit for. Give them a task, give them some direction, then stand back and see what they can do. 

Q. Parents and teachers often hide their mistakes so students rarely see good models of failure in their daily lives to emulate. Students, for example, never see the multiple iterations that lead a writer to a final draft. How can schools and parents provide more good examples of failure on a daily basis? 

A. I visited a wonderful school in California and watched two teachers plan out mistakes for their teaching time. They make mistakes in front of the kids so the kids can see them owning their own failures, adapting to the consequences of those failures, and making amends for that fallout with the kids. They also teach the kids to do the same.

We can either teach our kids to deny and cover up mistakes, pretending they never happened, and guaranteeing they will never learn from them, or we can model behavior that makes the most of those failures, that allows us to learn and change in response to our mistakes. 

Q. Teaching failure is popular advice these days. Other authors from Paul Tough to Julie Lythcott-Haims have suggested a similar mindset. From your experience as a teacher, do you think the advice is actually taking hold with parents?

A. I remain optimistic. I do know that in speaking to thousands and thousands of parents, teachers, administrators, and kids over the past couple of years, the feeling that parenting has gone over the deep end has taken hold. Parents know, deep down in their gut, that their parenting has gone awry and it does not feel good. They know that their relationships with their kids are strained, that they are checking the parent portal too often, that they should not take that homework or those cleats to school for their kid, but they don’t know how to stop. They don’t know how to turn that boat around and reverse course. That’s what I needed, too, so that’s the book I wrote. 

Q. You dedicate a chapter in your book to homework. You explain that parents increasingly are working on homework with their children. You suggest that parents be nearby ready to help if necessary, but keep busy with their own work. That’s good advice, but how do you know when your children are truly stuck or just want an easy way out of doing the homework? And how much help should you provide to middle and high-school students?

A. I tell a story in my talk about a kid whose parents sat on either side of her while she did her homework until she was 14, and helped her the second she began to feel frustrated. She never learned how to push through, how to know when she’s really stuck or if she simply needs to read the instructions again or even just look at the problem from a different angle. I had her parents go into the kitchen at homework time, and find something else to do.

Their daughter knew they were close by, but they were not right on top of her. When she got stuck, she moaned and griped, but they waited for her to ask for help. Then, when she asked, they said they were busy, and hold on just a second, “I have to finish this, but take another crack at it and I will be there in a minute.”

That process of stepping back took months, but after a while, they learned—and their daughter learned—the difference between momentarily frustrated and truly confused and stuck. When kids have highly directive or controlling parents, parents who step in the second (or even before) their child needs help, the child never learns to push through herself, to find the emotional wherewithal to persevere.

Wendy Rollick’s research on autonomy supportive parenting really helped me understand how important it is to give kids opportunities to get frustrated. The only way kids can handle important pedagogical techniques such as desirable difficulties (see the book, Make it Stick) is by encountering frustration, and trusting that if they can give it another shot, from another angle, they can figure it out on their own. 

Q. Colleges officials and employers of new college graduates complain to me all the time that their students or workers don’t know how to accept negative feedback because they hadn’t learned failure. Is it too late for young adults to learn these lessons, and how should colleges and employers instill these values in their new students and hires?

A. I was just talking to a professor at an Ivy League college about this yesterday. He was telling me that one of his students had requested that he receive no more negative feedback at all because he did not like it. He said it felt demeaning, and besides, he already knows how to write because he’s written his thesis and does not need any more feedback on writing.

I laughed—if only I stopped getting feedback on my writing when I was 21. I would be one immature writer. Speaking of immature, this kid really believed that he was above constructive feedback. I feel so sorry for him. He may have gotten into an Ivy League college, and will reap whatever benefits that entails, but this kid will never truly be great. He will never truly push himself or create anything innovative.

Great thinkers welcome feedback. Great thinkers adapt, and grow. This kid is done at 21 and that’s such a wasted opportunity, for him, and for the world. 

Jeffrey Selingo is author of three books on higher education. His newest book, There Is Life After College, explores why students struggle to launch into a career after college and how they can better navigate the route from high school through college and into the work world. It is scheduled to be released by HarperCollins April 12, but you can pre-order your copy now. 

He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar atGeorgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.

You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.