The Importance of Allowing your Children to Fail
When we love anyone as much as we love our children, we desperately want them to experience success and confidence. We want them to experience the joys of life. We love to picture them moving through their life’s journey with ease and satisfaction. Unfortunately, life often has other ideas. Despite the best of intentions, we, as parents, can sometimes get in the way of our children learning the skills necessary to live the life that we want for them and that they will come to want for themselves.
Building Resilience
One of the most critical skills a child can develop is resilience. When I define this concept for children, I often say “when you fall down, you can get back up again”. Resilience is the ability to recover from setbacks and adapt to challenges. This is not a skillset that we are born with but rather learned behavior that is cultivated through repeated exposure to obstacles and working their way through them. It goes without saying that without said exposure to obstacles in the form of failure and frustration, resilience is not fostered. Without resilience, it’s difficult for the child to learn.
Allowing Frustration and Strong Emotion
Sometimes, I will talk to my kiddos about my job as a “person-helper” and I will talk to them about their job. As I see it, their jobs are to experience new things and have thoughts and feelings about those things. Those feelings are important pieces of information and they are not the “be all, end all”. When kids experience an emotion, it is the caregiver’s job to help them make sense of it and regulate it. With enough of these repetitions, the child learns to emotionally self-regulate.
Instead of suppressing or avoiding strong feelings like frustration, children can learn to identify what they’re feeling, understand its cause, and develop strategies to move forward. The more they have the experience of being frustrated while in the presence of a loving, understanding and well-regulated adult, the more they can learn to continue on with an activity or task in spite of the frustration.
For example, a child struggling to complete a puzzle that is slightly advanced for their developmental level would likely feel overwhelmed or frustrated, possibly angry. A parent’s role in this situation isn’t to complete the puzzle for them but to validate the emotion, provide co-regulatory support (e.g., rubbing the child’s back, talking slowly and soothingly) and encouraging persistence. Over time, the child learns that frustration is temporary and manageable, leading to greater distress tolerance and an easier time learning.
Parents who act as guides rather than fixers encourage their children to develop healthy self-regulatory strategies, autonomy and independence.
Practical Tips for Parents
If you’re a caregiver who finds themself struggling to tolerate their child’s frustration and failure, consider these tips and tricks.
Check in with yourself: Identify what thoughts, body sensations and feelings are coming up for you. Self-regulate and remember to show up for your child in alignment with your values.
Ask reflective questions: Instead of solving problems for your child, ask guiding questions that help them think through solutions on their own.
Normalize frustration and failure: Help them identify their emotion and make sense of it. Let them know that you experience these things too.
Celebrate effort, not just outcomes: Focus on the effort your child puts into a task rather than whether they succeed or fail.
Co-regulate your child: Use intrinsic tools like gentle touch, a quiet tone of voice, or your proximity to them to soothe your child.
Written with compassion for my fellow parents. Parenting is hard!
Sarah Lesko, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
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