Dare to Fail

Dare to Fail

Do you remember that childhood mantra: If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again. Children are not afraid to try and fail. That’s how they learn. They persist, try new things, and take chances. Sooner or later, they succeed and their confidence grows.

In Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children,  Roberta Michnick Golenkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek list six skills vital for success in today’s world: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity, and confidence. Without confidence, the previous five remain dormant. To step up to a challenge, children must first have the confidence to step out. 

Golenkoff and Hirsh-Pasek write that confidence is composed of two components: the willingness to try and the pluck to persevere. Babies personify both. Imagine what courage is involved in taking your first step. You try, you fall down. You try again, you fall again. Finally, after many attempts, you walk across the room into Mommy’s arms. Success! What can you try now?

We’ve all heard stories about the little engines that couldn't — the Wright brothers’ many plane crashes, Thomas Edison’s thousand bulbs that didn’t light, J.K. Rowling’s rejection notices. Without their persistence, we would be stuck on the ground in the dark never having boarded the Hogwarts Express with Harry Potter. 

How can parents help their children gain confidence? Clinical psychologist Wendy Model says “get out of the way.” Let your children try and fail. Let them take calculated risks. When they fail or succeed, help them analyze what they did right or did wrong. Praise them for trying, not only for winning. Acknowledge their feelings and allow them to work it out for themselves with hugs or tears when needed. Don’t trap them in bubbles, let them run free, even when covered in band-aids.  

Confident children are willing to communicate their ideas, collaborate with others, learn new things, examine information, find problems, and create new solutions. Confident children make plans, execute them, and critically examine their results. Confident children have parents who allow them to try and fail and who encourage them to try again, parents who teach their children to view failure not as a catastrophe but as a learning experience. 

Author C.S. Lewis said, “Failures are finger posts on the way to achievement.” 

Teach your children to look at failure as a step toward improvement. Champion skiers started on the bunny slope. Olympic divers belly flop. Famous writers revise. All successful people started out as infants using their senses to learn about the world. 

Successful people don’t start at the top, they climb and fall and climb again. Teach your children to climb. Give them the encouragement they need to mount the next step. Applaud even when they tumble down and encourage them to climb again. 

For if at first you don’t succeed, those who keep trying will. 

(This is the final article in a series inspired by Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D. I encourage you to read it.)