September 23, 2024
We Can’t Shield Our Kids From Failure. And We Shouldn’t.
“Helicopter” parents (monitoring every detail of their children’s lives) and “snowplow” parents (ensuring no obstacles get in their children’s way) mean well: They genuinely believe that shielding their children from failure can help them succeed.
But the more I read about raising successful, resilient kids, the more I have come to understand that these parenting approaches don’t work. In fact, psychologists say that “snowplow” parents may unwittingly produce “snowflakes,” children who lack resilience in the face of difficulties. Instead, allowing children to experience setbacks and work through them is a much more effective approach for ensuring their future success.
In her latest book, 8 Setbacks That Can Make a Child a Success, acclaimed parenting expert Michelle Icard demonstrates that children are safer and more successful when they are allowed to take risks and work through failure. Icard contends that “not being perfect is so key to their future success.” If kids fail to launch, Icard suggests, it’s because they’ve never been given genuine opportunities to be independent. Icard believes that when kids are given time to sit with their mistakes and gain practice addressing them, they become more resilient.
When I spoke with Icard recently about her new book and the approach she advocates, she used the term “greenhouse parent” to describe a potentially more useful parenting paradigm. While a greenhouse caretaker provides a protective environment allowing young seedlings to germinate, that caretaker also occasionally takes the tender young plants outside for a “shock” so that they can become accustomed to harsh conditions. Such “hardening off” prepares plants to survive outside of the greenhouse permanently.
Parents, Icard told me, “don’t have to manufacture or look for conflict” for their children to develop resilience. They simply need to “open the door and let them be human out in the world.” Just as a plant becomes strong through exposure to the elements, “a child grows from discomfort.”
“I was interested in what we do to usher kids from childhood to adulthood,” Icard told me, in explaining her current focus. “A key component in traditional rites-of-passage is not protecting kids from failure,” she continued. “Kids learn so much from it. While we now view failure as a bad thing, I wanted to explore it on a fundamental level. If kids don’t fail, they don’t learn what they need.” By allowing kids to solve kid-sized problems, they begin their metamorphosis into adults.
“The kind of failure that makes you feel alone can lead to real growth,” Icard told me. “There is a universal understanding that in order to grow up, we need to separate from our parents. You have experiences you have to handle on your own, and you’re new at it so you mess up.
“Maybe you have a desire to be popular or to be perfect, and you make certain choices and you fail. If we don’t rescue kids, they learn how to handle the pain they experience and they learn about who they are. They come back from this experience a better version of themselves. That is what the cycle of failure can do as they are growing up.”
From Seed to Sprout, From Sapling to Sequoia
As Icard’s greenhouse metaphor suggests, there’s still a vital role for parents in helping their children grow through failure, much as gardeners are often indispensable in growing plants.
While kids can and should largely navigate many blunders and mishaps on their own, they may need guidance on how to take action and make amends when they suffer more significant failures. But it’s still the kids and not their parents who must grow through such crises; as a young person works through such difficult experiences by issuing an apology, modifying their behavior, or changing their beliefs, they gain the skills required of an accountable and resilient adult.
In such situations, how can parents walk the line between doing too much and not enough? Icard suggests that rather than rescuing their child, parents should support their child through the learning process. Icard offers parents a three-pronged approach to helping their children deal positively with acute failure: contain, resolve, and evolve. I asked her to briefly explain each element.
Contain: “When a parent learns that their child has made a significant mistake, they should first do their best to contain it. Sometimes, you contain the child: they need to stay home. Or, you contain their activity: they need to stay offline for a while. Sometimes, you just acknowledge the issue.”
Resolve: “In the resolve state, the child has the ball. The child needs to develop muscle memory around failure. You don’t want them to develop learned helplessness where they crumble and wait. This state doesn’t have to be heroic or complex. Maybe they need to apologize or make amends, to fix what’s broken. Parents can be a coach or a sounding board as kids develop their plan of action.”
Evolve: “The last state in addressing the crisis is called evolve. Parents need to put the situation in the rearview mirror. Don’t press the bruise. By focusing continually on the mistake, the child may begin to think, ‘This is who I am.’ Instead say, ‘That was tough. You did a good job handling it, and we don’t need to talk about it anymore unless you want to.’”
Icard contends that the evolve portion is “the hardest part for parents because they worry, especially if the problem was related to their child’s social struggles. A lack of social connection is really hard for parents to watch. But you need to believe that your child will rise to your expectations, and you need to start treating them that way.”
A Children’s Bill of Rights
To help parents respect the independence of their children, Icard has created a Bill of Rights that’s integral to helping students work through their mistakes; those rights honor children’s dignity. For example, her bill guarantees children some privacy, the right to practice making informed decisions, and the right to self-advocate.
Icard explained that when a child fails, a parent may feel “they need to go to ground zero.” For example, when a teacher reports that a child isn’t doing their schoolwork, parents may decide that they need to review every homework assignment or monitor every minute of the child’s screen time. But this approach doesn’t allow the child to take ownership of the problem and the solution. Icard says that while “a parent could do that for a time, ultimately kids need to have some say to practice negotiation and self-advocacy.”
When recovering from significant failures, kids “still deserve access to the Bill of Rights—even if they have limits on a couple of them. They still have the right to explore and make more mistakes. They still need to be allowed to be a kid with lots of opportunities to keep messing up and keep learning from it.”
“It is especially important that we don’t make the failure about us,” Icard warned, noting that parents should not escalate a child’s negative state by piling on their emotions (i.e. “Oh, this breaks my heart!”). Processing their own feelings as well as those of a parent is a lot for a kid to handle.
But it can be difficult for adults to squelch their emotions during a crisis. Icard said that when “we go into crisis mode, we rely on tools we used when we were little (fight, flight, freeze, fawn). If a parent learns that their child sent a nude, they need to take a breath before reacting and question whether their instinctual response is really the best one.” In short, they need to act like adults. “Look at many solutions,” Icard counsels. “Pick the best one, not your most urgent response.”
Additionally, Icard feels that parents need to step up and support one another when their children experience failures. “A common reaction is to paint parents as villains when bad things happen to their kids. It is not an indictment of your parenting when kids have even a moral failure. We are quick to judge rather than support families.” Were we to do a better job of vulnerably sharing with each other rather than pointing fingers and judging when our children stumble, perhaps those failures wouldn’t seem so significant or daunting.
Recipes for Success
There’s nothing daunting about Icard’s accessible approach; it’s among the many reasons she is justly renowned as one of this country’s leading parenting experts. At the end of our interview, I told Icard that “8 Setbacks That Can Make a Child a Success” reminded me of her book “Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen.” Both offer incredibly helpful “recipes” for addressing problems rather than overwhelming readers by suggesting the impossible.
“I think it’s all deeply personal,” Icard said of her approach. “In college I studied education and we learned to simplify the learning process, breaking things down and making concepts relatable to what people already understand. In middle school, I switched from a school with low expectations to one with high expectations. I had to learn how to learn. I had to break things down. I’m fascinated by how we learn and want to make this learning curve as easy as I can for parents.”
As an educator, I appreciate how Icard can take a crisis and break it down into its component parts by containing it, addressing the damage, and moving forward. In this way dealing with failure becomes a character-building exercise for an adolescent. In part two of her book, she dedicates chapters to archetypal failures connected with dispositions such as the Blacksheep, the Daredevil, or the Loner, providing specific advice on how to support kids through the failure connected to these phases.
As our conversation wrapped up, Icard discussed one of the major roadblocks in dealing squarely with a young person’s setbacks: an overly narrow definition of success. We work overtime on impression management—especially in an age of social media, in which bland highlight reels and groupthink steadily narrow our sense of individuality, punish difference, impoverish our imaginations, and rob our dreams of more expansive ideas of what it means to succeed.
For Icard, success isn’t narrow or data driven. She told me that “it’s not about getting the fastest time or the best GPA. A child who has the opportunity to contribute to the community feels successful. A kid doesn’t need to be the best on the team to be the best teammate. Kids also feel successful when they become competent in something they enjoy—not something they are best at, but a real, sincere interest. Think less about checking boxes for college apps and more about children developing an interest in what brings them happiness.”
In sum: “Our kids know their success is being monitored and measured nonstop by both their peers and the adults in their lives, and it’s unequivocally hurting them,” Icard writes in her book.
Broadening our idea about what makes kids successful not only helps them. It can also help us view their failures with perspective and tolerance, as steps backward that might actually help them move forward. If we allow these tender plants to grow at their own pace, attuned to their natural world rather than some artificially imposed metric (think pesticide), they may not wind up looking like every other tree in the forest. Instead they’ll reach for the sky, looking like and flourishing as themselves.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
You may also be interested in reading other monthly book reviews written by Elaine Griffin for Intrepid Ed News.
