The scars that teach
Protecting children from failure can have damaging consequences.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
My wife is a teacher who believes if her student fails, it’s on her. So when our son’s work ethic got him underwater, she didn’t want him to repeat the grade. We appealed and he was moved up. I believe failure can motivate him, but she believes failure is not an option. When is it okay for a child to fail?
Whether the issue is school, sports, games, or some other endeavor, failure should always be an option.
Because failure is such a natural outcome of faulty preparation, adults often have to go through a variety of wild machinations to take it off the table. Schools, for instance, resort to endless test retakes, open-ended deadlines, and minimum grade policies to keep kids afloat. In so doing, they remove responsibility from the child. That’s bad for their long-term development.
You, too, had to resort to a formal bureaucratic appeal to have your child avoid failing. Most schools have done away with summer school, so presumably he fell upward without any real consequences to cause him to rethink his path and make changes. Guess which path he will likely follow next year.
I am assuming you didn’t ignore his lackluster effort along the way and wait for the guillotine at the end. It’s important to put systematic consequences in place with each report card, such as loss of privileges or Saturday School (if it’s offered). Kids are still kids and should ideally experience failure incrementally, learning to modify their habits before it’s too late.
In general, the fear of failure can be a powerful motivator for change. Remove the possibility of failure, and you often remove motivation. Consider sports. If a team practices sloppily and lazily yet wins all their games, they’re almost certain to continue practicing that way, never improving. Let them lose a few, however, and they will start to alter their preparation habits.
Removing the option to fail also removes a powerful teaching tool. Children often learn their most enduring life lessons by experiencing failure.
My mother used to tell me how she badly injured her tongue as a child. I was young, so I don’t remember the details, but it had something to do with a piece of farm equipment she was told not to touch. She touched it anyway, and the force knocked her backward so hard that her teeth went through her tongue.
It’s instructive that I don’t remember the story’s details, but there’s one thing I do remember vividly.
The scar.
Whenever she stuck out her tongue, you could see the imprint where her teeth bit through. It hurt me just looking at it.
That scar kept me from touching a lot of things I was told not to touch, and it wasn’t even mine. In this way, as Yoda once said, “The greatest teacher, failure is.”
No parent wants to see a child hurt. But making them immune from developing scars when they do something wrong means depriving them of one of life’s best teachers.
When a perfectly capable student fails a grade due to laziness but is passed on anyway, the student fails to earn a “learning scar” for his faulty preparation. He will continue to put forth little effort, expecting big prizes. When the penalty for doing little is identical to the reward for doing a lot, kids do less, not more. That brings growth to a halt.
In general, it’s best to let the consequences of a child’s actions play out naturally. If he spends more time on video games than homework, let him suffer the low grade. If he chooses to break the rules, let him deal with the detention.
Failing an entire grade might seem like a much bigger deal than those (and it is), but it’s a completely foreseeable—and avoidable—outcome, so the same principles apply (although in most cases, I’d still prefer summer school).
As parents, we like certificates a lot better than scars, but scars can do just as much to set a child’s path toward success. Don’t deprive your child of the ability to receive them.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.