Failure

A parent in a forum I’m on asked this:

How would one answer this question:
How can we expect our kids to make their own decisions when they are not developmentally ready or experienced enough to be aware of the future consequences?
K T

I would assume that such a person asking this question believes that a child who tries and does not succeed has failed, and that such failure is a permanent condition.

I believe that failure is essential to learning, and that we learn as much from our mistakes (often more) than we do from our successes.

Likely, I’d take them to task on the premises behind the question:
How will the child develop and gain experience, but by trying?

We’ve helped our daughter name the consequence of her actions (“my stomach feels uncomfortably full”– that’s a consequence of overeating. How might that be avoided in the future?). Letting children make their own decisions isn’t something we let our children do in a vacuum. But being there when they try–whether they succeed or fail–and helping them think through and puzzle through–letting them develop and gain experience–that’s what we do.

It’s not like I never say, “I don’t think that will work” and explain why I think that . . . I don’t get in the way of the experimentation unless life or limb is on the line.

–Jen

We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through
our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of
success, but it isn’t. Success often lies just the other side of failure.
Leo F. Buscaglia

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.
Napoleon Hill

Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience.
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every
discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is
true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which
we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
John Keats

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another
chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the
staying down.
Mary Pickford

Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is
an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own
versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
Samuel McChord Crothers

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss
of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they
were to success when they gave up.
Thomas A. Edison