Failing is good for kids, if only parents knew how to let them

Words no parent wants to hear from the kindergarten teacher at pick up: “I need a quick word with you.” While my daughter was thrilled – she took off to play with friends – my heart sank. The teacher warned me that my daughter would be marked “below benchmark” in a literacy assessment, to be included in her spring progress report.

I know – in theory – that struggle is good for kids, that resilience is built through challenge. But theory collapses quickly in the face of your own child. During the car ride home, I started to spiral: Maybe she has a learning disability. Maybe other kids are already reading fluently because their perfect parents are doing a better job helping them learn. Maybe I’m failing my daughter in one of the most essential ways: I am a writer, and she can’t read.

It’s a feeling Laura Steacy knows well. A competitive synchronized swimmer for a decade who turned to elite coaching, the Toronto mom said seeing her eight-year-old son struggle with swimming basics has been hard to watch, even though she realizes how important it is for kids to experience failure.

“I just want him to do well – and I got so infuriated watching his lessons, I couldn’t take it.” she said. “I just kept thinking, why can’t he get this?”

But Steacy understands that when parents put too many expectations on their kids – and voice their disappointment when they fall short – it rarely works as intended. So she has started bringing a book to read during his swimming lessons instead of focusing on his performance. “I can genuinely just ask him afterward, ‘Hey, did you have fun?’ And he says yes, and we go about the rest of our day.”

Steacy said the most important message for kids is that struggling to learn something is separate from who they are as a person. “It’s okay for kids to hear, ‘No, you didn’t do that properly, and no, you still haven’t figured out that technique or get the score you wanted – but you’re still a fantastic person.’”

But that distinction between performance and identity can be difficult for kids to grasp, and perhaps even harder for parents. “I’ve seen parents crying at competitions,” Steacy said. “And their kids aren’t even crying.”

The instinct to react, to fix, to absorb our kids’ struggles as our own can get in the way of what children actually need, said Dr. Zia Lakdawalla, child psychologist and clinical director at Foundations for Emotional Wellness in Toronto.

“We’ve gotten to this place where, when kids do experience failure, it’s so exquisitely uncomfortable for a parent,” she said. Instead of focusing on resilience – which Lakdawalla said has become a meaningless buzzword, often equated with coming out of adversity unscathed – she suggests parents focus on building anti-fragility, or “emerging from struggle stronger than you would have otherwise.”

She also said parents need to leave their own emotional baggage behind and learn to support kids in the discomfort of struggle. It’s a good point. If I look deep enough, somewhere buried in my concern for my kid’s reading scores is a fear she’ll be embarrassed to read aloud, like I was at her age.

Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, agrees the impulse to internalize a child’s success and failure is common in modern parenting culture, with its hyper-fixation on comparison.

“We’re sitting in the shame of where we think other kids are – which is often misguided,” Lahey said. “And the shame of what other parents will think – which, truthfully, they likely don’t.”

Lahey advises parents to break this habit by focusing on the journey, not the destination.

Rather than zero in on school grades or extracurricular accomplishments, Lahey and her now-grown children used to identify three goals they had for each season. The exercise inherently focuses on experiences, not results. “They might want to try something new or make a new friend – and oh my gosh, you learn so much about who your kids truly are,” Lahey said.

I asked my daughter about her goals for spring, and was not at all surprised that her aspirations have nothing to do with the mastery of long and short vowel sounds. Instead, she wants to “join Chloe for ballet, have a playdate with Kate, and go to Lauder’s house.”

Her answer felt fitting, because when I replay the moment with her kindergarten teacher, what I would have seen – had I not been so busy spiralling over her literacy score – is a girl who is transforming before my eyes.

This kid, once a pandemic baby, then an extreme barnacle toddler, tore off from her mom and teacher to ask a boy, standing by himself, to play. Soon, the pair joined her other friends, screaming that the floor is lava while finding safe ground on a melting snowbank.

While I was in shame-panic mode, my daughter was showing me progress that can’t be measured.

Chances are good that our kids are advancing every day, giving us plenty of reasons to be proud. The struggle is real – and necessary – and the growth is already happening. Parents just have to know where to look.