Gift of Failure
An examination of what we've created through our fear-of-failure culture and how we need to allow people to fail in safe settings in order to learn.
in America art and music are looked at as things for all kids to dabble in, but serious training or cultivation is reserved for kids who show talent, in East Asia there is a common belief that anyone can and should be able to achieve a certain degree of mastery in a variety of areas, whether it be mathematics, art, music, or physical education. It just takes effort.
The cost of over-protecting is that the child does not develop the skills to fight back, speak up or get the hell out of the way.
social interactions cultivated during free play are “so important that social behavior at recess in kindergarten predicts achievement at the end of first grade, as measured by class work and standardized tests of general knowledge, early reading, and math concepts. By a whopping 40 percent, peer play is significantly more predictive of academic success than standardized achievement tests.
eight elementary schools agreed to eliminate recess rules, relax supervision, and stop intervening in students’ playtime. Consequently, those schools saw a reduction in bullying, fewer rule infractions, reduced need for adult supervision, and an improvement in attention and behavior during class time. Grant Schofield, one of the investigators in the study, explains that backing off on adult supervision and interventions during free play allows kids “to think for themselves and sort [social interactions] out.”
the strategies that make us successful in the business world do not translate to the business of parenting. Reams of research papers on child development and behavioral psychology reveal that while these methods may work to motivate assembly-line workers, they are terrible tools for motivating children to engage in creative problem-solving, and they actually undermine long-term motivation and investment in learning. Even more damaging, the use of rewards and incentives prioritizes scores and grades over exploration and experimentation, which undermines a teacher’s ability to foster self-directed and intrinsically motivated learning.
when our children fail, we appropriate those failures as our own. This is not only disastrous for parents’ self-worth; it’s shortsighted and unimaginative. Failure—from small mistakes to huge miscalculations—is a necessary and critical part of our children’s development. Failure is too often characterized as a negative: an F in math or a suspension from school. However, all sorts of disappointments, rejections, corrections, and criticisms are small failures, all opportunities in disguise, valuable gifts misidentified as tragedy. Sadly, when we avoid or dismiss these opportunities, in order to preserve children’s sense of ease and short-term happiness, we deprive them of the experiences they need to have in order to become capable, competent adults.
Melissa Atkins Wardy, author of the book Redefining Girly: How Parents Can Fight the Stereotyping and Sexualizing of Girlhood, from Birth to Tween,
Competition, in turn, encourages overparenting, even when the competition is for approval rather than trophies or scholarships. In one study, mother-child pairs were told to complete an “About Me” questionnaire. Half of the pairs were told to complete the form “for fun,” while the mothers in the other half were told that their children would be meeting a group of kids who would use the form to “rate” their children. The first group of moms, the ones who had no expectation that their child would be assessed, sat back and watched their child fill out the form on their own. However, the mothers who believed their children would be rated and scrutinized pressured their child to fill in answers that might help the child look good and be liked by the other kids. The very idea that their child would be rated or measured against other children caused those mothers to overparent.
Those trophies, medals, and scholarships that we dangle as reward for our children’s athletic efforts don’t just heighten a sense of competition and anxiety, they undermine drive. Just as rewards for positive behaviors are intrinsic motivation killers in academic and social contexts, they also dampen participation and enthusiasm in sports and other recreational activities.
Decades of studies and hundreds of pages of scientific evidence point to one conclusion that sounds crazy, but it absolutely works: If parents back off the pressure and anxiety over grades and achievement and focus on the bigger picture—a love of learning and independent inquiry—grades will improve and test scores will go up.
Give the child a set of two or three pencils and teach him to switch pencils when he feels his brain getting distracted. Now, it’s not really about which pencil he uses, but switching pencils gives his brain the prompt, “Oh—I’m distracted, I need to get focused again,” and switching pencils becomes the signal for his brain to refocus.
Keep your child on a regular sleep schedule, even on weekends and vacations. Studies show that it takes a long time to recover from even a small shift in sleep routines, and sufficient sleep is key to almost every aspect of developing executive function.
Teach your child critical listening skills. Part of improving working memory is filtering out all of the stuff kids don’t need to remember. If you listen to the news on the radio on the way to school, ask your child, “What do you think were the two most important ideas in that story?”
Timers and alarm clocks can work miracles. Set a timer for when one task needs to end and another should begin. That way, it’s the timer, not the parent, who is the “nag.” If the child can watch the time run down, that’s also helpful in that it makes time a real, rather than an abstract, concept.
the National Education Association reports that one-third of these teachers will quit after three years, and 46 percent will be gone within five years. According to Ron Clark, the winner of a Disney American Teacher Award, many of these fleeing educators cite “issues with parents” as one of their main reasons for abandoning the profession.
a principal who had been named the administrator of the year in her state but had chosen to leave education. “I screamed, ‘You can’t leave us,’ and she quite bluntly replied, ‘Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can’t deal with parents anymore; they are killing us.’” I love teaching dearly, but “issues with parents”
As a college president, . . . someone who oversees the review of roughly six thousand carefully crafted applications every year, let me promise you: We don’t care. Show me that your kid is great at math, or that she truly loves to play the cello. Tell me he edits the high school literary magazine and has an extensive stash of nineteenth-century Russian novels. But the expensive trips to far-flung poverty? Fifty-two activities scattered across the seven days of the week? Honestly. It doesn’t help. Give me a kid with a passion for learning, a kid who has demonstrated some measure of autonomy and motivation. Give me a kid who knows his or her mind. But these things are harder to come by if the child has been tutored and handheld from birth.
In order to help children make the most of their education, parents must begin to relinquish control and focus on three goals: embracing opportunities to fail, finding ways to learn from that failure, and creating positive home-school relationships.
Despite tensions between parents and teachers, decades of research shows that positive family-school relationships are vital to student success. Positive parent-teacher partnerships don’t just benefit students; they are a boon to everyone involved. Teachers who encourage parental involvement in school are rated more favorably than teachers who do not, even in unrelated areas such as educational effectiveness. Students learn more when families are involved in their education, and parents feel more engaged and invested in their child’s education when teachers invite them into the process.
When children are young, your job during homework time is to be nearby, busy with other activities, while the child is doing homework. You are present, but not hovering. Supportive, but not intrusive.
the job of a parent is to raise self-sufficient, capable, and ethical adults.
Quality homework shores up knowledge that has already been encoded, and pushes students to apply that knowledge to new contexts. This final aspect of learning, in which students create answers rather than merely recalling them, is called generative learning. Homework that promotes generative learning offers students opportunities to play with skills, exercise some trial and error, and create their own answers. While generative learning is vital to mastery, it is also hard.
Grades are extrinsic rewards for academic performance. Extrinsic rewards undermine motivation and long-term learning. Ergo, grades undermine motivation and long-term learning. There. Elephant identified. I’d love to remove the elephant from the room altogether and replace it with something less unwieldy and more attractive, but as our system of education is currently based on the exchange of grades for performance, I have no choice but to talk about how to retrain our brains and our children to look past the beast and see the other, more meaningful rewards that grades obscure.
Getting an “A” measures that the student “knows how to play the game of school.” It does NOT always, as practiced, demonstrate real mastery of material.
there’s plenty of evidence to show that grades are just about the worst way to promote learning through intrinsic motivation. Researchers asked a group of fifth graders to read a passage from a textbook. It was one of those classic samples given on standardized tests, something that’s not very interesting and requires paying attention. One third of the kids were told to read the passage and nothing else, the second third were told they would be tested on their comprehension for a grade, and the final third were told that they would be tested but would not receive a grade. Everyone was tested in the end. The two groups who had no expectation of a grade did better on the test than the kids who knew they were going to be graded. Furthermore, they were more interested and curious about the reading.
a researcher gave middle school students weekly math quizzes. He told half the kids that the grades would not count, that the quizzes were just to monitor their learning and progress. The other group of kids was told that the quizzes would impact their final grade. Again, the kids who were not concerned about the impact on their final grades learned more and had higher levels of interest and curiosity. These differences endured over time, too. When the researchers returned at a later date to test these same kids again, the ones who had no expectation of being graded retained more of the material than the students who read with the fact that they would be graded in mind.
While grades can be a measure of ability, more often they are a measure of the skills that make for successful students: solid executive function skills, compliance, willingness to please, ability to follow directions, and self-discipline.
Narrative comments and feedback on students’ performance, according to research, are “better than grades at both promoting kids’ self-motivation to learn and boosting their achievement.”
The less we push our kids toward educational success, the more they will learn. The less we use external, or extrinsic, rewards on our children, the more they will engage in their education for the sake and love of learning.
All kids begin life motivated by their own desire to explore, create, and build. When babies take their first step, it is because they are driven to discover and master their environment. If there’s any trick to parenting, it is to keep our children from losing that internal drive.
when it comes to encouraging long-term drive and enthusiasm for learning, rewards are terrible motivators.
The monkeys were quite good at opening the locks, so surely, given a reward, they would open them even faster, right? Nope. The monkeys who received raisins actually opened the locks more slowly, and with less frequency, than they did when no reward was offered. Something about the extrinsic reward interfered with their intrinsic motivation and threw them off their game (or latch, in this case).
That same drive that allows kids to learn the name of every god in the Greco-Roman pantheon or the scientific name and genus of every dinosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period fuels their learning early on in school. As kids get older, our goal should be to preserve this natural curiosity and thirst for discovery at all costs. Unfortunately, the methods we use to motivate our children, such as rewards, are in direct conflict with what keeps kids engaged and interested. Put simply, if you’d like your child to stop doing his schoolwork, pay him for good grades.
First, rewards don’t work, because humans perceive them as attempts to control behavior, which undermines intrinsic motivation. Second, human beings are more likely to stick with tasks that arise out of their own free will and personal choice. Given the choice between sticking with a “I have to” task or doing something else, most people would choose anything that is the product of their autonomy and self-determination.
In Deci’s view, money does not motivate, so much as it controls, and that control disrupts our sense of intrinsic motivation. After a few more studies in this vein, he concluded that just about anything humans perceive as controlling is detrimental to long-term motivation, and therefore, learning.
Establish nonnegotiable expectations, such as “Homework will be completed thoroughly and on time,” or “Curfew is at ten and I expect you to be here or call if something comes up.” After those expectations are made clear, older children should be allowed the autonomy to figure out the precise manner and strategy they will use in order to fulfill these expectations. As long as your expectation is that homework will be completed thoroughly, and on time, where, when, and how they complete their homework should be up to them.
Rewards work for repetitive, uncomplicated, or boring tasks, but when it comes to creativity and nuanced learning, they are lousy motivators. One of my favorite research studies on the subject sums up the effect of money on learning in its title: “Money enhances memory consolidation—but only for boring material.”
This is why intermittent rewards can work even if routine, expected rewards do not. The thrill and surprise of a reward when you least expect it can jump-start motivation, but again, only when it’s not part of a routine practice.
incorporating risk-taking and failure into her grading. “I tell students that if they attempt a challenging project, I will take that into consideration when I grade,
for a goal to work, the child has to own it.
Be supportive of their goals. Some goals are going to seem trivial, but if they are important enough for your child to verbalize, they are important enough for your respect and support. Deci calls this strategy “autonomy-supportive,” but I call it smart parenting.
We want life to be smooth sailing for our kids, but interesting research shows that smooth sailing isn’t where real, deep learning happens. Small failures, when the stakes are relatively low and the potential for emotional and cognitive growth is high, are what psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork call “desirable difficulties.” Learning that comes with challenge is stored more effectively and more durably in the brain than learning that comes easily.
The best part about being an autonomy-supportive parent is that all the negative stuff we do to get our children to do the things we want them to do—nagging, nitpicking, hovering, directing—stops. These parenting techniques are destructive to our relationships with our kids, anyway, so parenting in their absence is a more peaceful and enjoyable affair all around.
Children are starved for responsibility and a role within the family, and all the jockeying for power, and the mischief that arises when their hands are idle, stems from our failure to give our kids a clear way to contribute to the family’s well-being.
Testing limits is a way of testing independence, and that’s a good thing, even if it makes us want to stick a fork in our heads. It’s exhausting, yes, but it’s a necessary part of creating independent kids. One way to make this testing easier is to establish clear expectations for their behavior, and more important, stick to those expectations and employ consequences when those expectations are not met. This limit-setting is a key element of autonomy-supportive parenting. Limits are structure.
Parents who establish high standards and subsequently enforce those high standards are not necessarily controlling. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to show that children react favorably to parents who hold children accountable for lapses in behavior or failure to uphold expectations. However, when parents resort to controlling behavior in their attempts to hold children to standards—when they offer bribes, rewards, excessive monitoring, or pressure—this corrodes a child’s sense of autonomy and therefore his intrinsic motivation (and, as we have established, his success in school and life).
CONTROLLING PARENTS GIVE LOTS OF UNSOLICITED ADVICE AND DIRECTION. That’s not the right way to load the dishwasher. Always wash the plates before putting them in and stack all the large plates on the left side.
Unsolicited advice and direction, commonly known as “helping” from the parent’s perspective or “nagging” from the child’s, interferes with her sense of autonomy, conveys a lack of faith in her competence, and, because it’s irritating and upsetting to both of you, undermines your connection.
CONTROLLING PARENTS TAKE OVER. I’ll just do it, you go play. We have to get to school, I’ll just do it myself when I get home.
CONTROLLING PARENTS OFFER EXTRINSIC MOTIVATORS IN EXCHANGE FOR BEHAVIORS. You get one jelly bean for every toy you clean up. If you walk the dog every morning, I’ll buy you new sneakers.
CONTROLLING PARENTS PROVIDE SOLUTIONS OR THE CORRECT ANSWER BEFORE THE CHILD HAS HAD A CHANCE TO REALLY STRUGGLE WITH A PROBLEM. But honey, you know five times four is twenty, you just did that down here.
CONTROLLING PARENTS DON’T LET CHILDREN MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS. Do your math first, and then your spelling. Do your homework here at the table where I can see you. You should play tennis rather than baseball this season.
AUTONOMY-SUPPORTIVE PARENTS GUIDE CHILDREN TOWARD SOLUTIONS. I know you know what five times three is, so what happens when you add another five? Why do you think the cold glass broke when you poured hot water into it?
Discoveries children make under their own steam will always be remembered longer and understood more deeply than the answers you hand them out of impatience.
AUTONOMY-SUPPORTIVE PARENTS ALLOW FOR MISTAKES AND HELP CHILDREN UNDERSTAND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THOSE MISTAKES. It’s no big deal that you dropped that glass, I’ll show you how to clean it all up, and you can remember to carry fewer next time.
AUTONOMY-SUPPORTIVE PARENTS VALUE THE MISTAKES AS MUCH AS THE SUCCESSES. I’m so proud of you for sticking with that worksheet even though it was hard for you.
AUTONOMY-SUPPORTIVE PARENTS ACKNOWLEDGE CHILDREN’S FEELINGS OF FRUSTRATION AND DISAPPOINTMENT. I get mad, too, when I can’t do something right the first time, but I keep trying until I figure it out.
AUTONOMY-SUPPORTIVE PARENTS GIVE FEEDBACK. Look down at your buttons; something looks off—can you figure out what’s wrong? If you forgot to carry the two in that other problem, maybe you made the same mistake on this problem?