An African proverb says: “Success in life largely depends on how you handle your failures.” People don’t like to fail, and they don’t want to talk about it. Yet, how they handle failures define who they are more so than their success. As anything, graceful, or successful, failing requires practice, and that’s where parents come in. They are the ones that prepare their children for adulthood, for their prosperous future. They’re also the ones that hate to see their children fail at anything: school, sports, first dance, or first bike ride.
The first step that any child takes is not a successful one. It takes many attempts, and many falls, for a child to learn how to walk. Parents guide them through that process, sometimes by helping out and sometimes by letting them fall. Yet, as they grow, that growing up process becomes only about shielding their children from any amount of pain or discomfort. It’s tough to see someone you love be hurt or be upset, but it’s how children become independent adults equipped with coping skills. Jessica Lahey, in her book “The Gift of Failure”, shares a similar sentiment. She also dispels some of the modern-day myths about parenting, mainly that parents have complete control over their kids’ development; that parent can never do enough for their kids; and that their children’s success or failure defines them.
Golda Ginsburg, a psychiatry professor at UConn Health in Farmington, Connecticut, conducted studies to determine if children of anxious parents have a higher risk of developing anxiety disorders. The answer was an astounding “yes”. Helicopter parenting creates apprehensive children, afraid to try anything new for fear of failure or to see a disappointed look in their parents’ eyes. Kids need to learn how to face and deal with their fears to reduce their anxiety. When parents learn not to prevent stress in their children, they give them the tools to increase their competence in handling it.
There are many consequences of shielding kids from any type of discomforts such as a development a sense of entitlement, lack of personal responsibility, or the use of power to solve even the smallest of problems. None of them lead to the development of confident and a resilient adult. Children’s successes or failures don’t define their parents. Their future success, however, may depend on whether they’re allowed to try and fail.