The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed

This book had a profound effect on my thinking about how to be a parent. I don't think of myself as the type who hovers, but I'm starting to understand that I hover more than I realize. It's not that the author is advocating for hands-off parenting. Instead, she points out a lot of the ways in which parents take the reins and deny their kids all sense of control, and how detrimental that can be. We want our kids to grow up to be responsible and capable adults, but how can they do that when we take away their sense of autonomy? This book made me realize it's more important for me to teach my kids life skills like how to manage their time than it is for me to be managing every detail. My doing so comes from good intentions and a desire to see them succeed, but at the same time it conveys subtle messages to them I don't want conveyed.I read a lot of psychology and social science books because the research just plain fascinates me. While this book offers a lot of anecdotes, it's also infused with an excellent grasp of research. Lahey's background in education shines through, and her suggestions are grounded in the same evidence-based research that I've read. If kids seem different today, it's because they are, and it's not just technology that's driving this change, it's the way parents treat their children and how they view them. We want them to be successful, but in our test-driven, high achieving culture, we are sometimes guilty of emphasizing the wrong things. After reading a great deal about helpless college students, children suffering from stress-related ills, and the mental health problems plaguing universities, this book helped me form an idea as to why this may be: rather than teaching our children to work for the things they want, we're setting them on a prescribed path and sending them the message that they're only okay as long as they follow that prescribed path. Reading this book makes the mystifying question of why children don't want to take risks quite clear: because we've taught them that there's nothing worse than failure.Yet this book doesn't just discuss research, it also offers a lot of practical solutions for parents. Fair warning, though: not all of these suggestions are easy to swallow. This is where some of the pain came in for me, because I saw myself reflected in some of the behaviors Lahey suggests parents need to break. Giving her suggestions a try isn't going to be easy from a parenting standpoint, and it will require me to retrain myself as well.I also think there's a lot of value in how this book offers some very good insight into the educational system, which I think is a big benefit to parents who don't come from a teaching background. Lahey proposes that parents and teachers work as partners, and she offers suggestions for how parents can open up dialog with their kids' teachers. Considering how adversarial our current culture and politics paint the relationship between educators and parents, there is a great deal of value in this aspect of the book. It doesn't serve anyone for parents and teachers to be at one another's throats, not when both sides want the same thing. This book offers constructive ways parents can form that partnership with teachers, so that everyone can work together toward the same goal.I highly recommend this book to both parents and educators.

Jessica Lahey and I have never met in person, though we have been online writerly acquaintances for about five years. She has read my writings and commented on them (as has, in one case, her son, Finn), and I am professionally acquainted with her sister, Anna Jones. All this to let you know that while this comment is as unbiased as possible, there is a connection between us.THE GIFT OF FAILURE is an important book, useful and lucid. Jessica has researched many resources -- the book's bibliography is six pages of small type, listing 154 sources -- and has distilled their findings, conclusions, suggestions, prescriptions, proscriptions, warnings, and encouragements into a tight, well-structured, and eminently readable guide for the possibly perplexed American parent. If you have school-aged children, please allow me to urge you to read this book and keep it handy.The one caveat I will raise is that Jessica is writing from a certain solidly middle-class perspective, in the older definition of the middle class as a well-educated, professionally successful, and financially privileged population. Some readers may find her casual references to such luxuries as private schools, Latin classes, and schedules jam-packed with soccer games, dance lessons, and music tutorials, to be distancing. Don't let those frills distract you. They are minimal and immaterial. This book is filled in generous measure, packed down and flowing over, with insights and advice of value to any parent of school-aged children, from any segment of society. I can only wish that THE GIFT OF FAILURE had been available when I was raising my own son and trying to figure out how best to do it.(NB -- Amazon tells me that if I give this book four stars, that means "I like it," while if I give it five, that means "I love it." Well, I don't "love" it, but I more than "like" it; since I can't give it four-and-a-half stars, or 4.9, or some such, I am giving it five. It is an important book.)

Growing up, I never handled failure very well. This was most evident on the baseball field. Baseball success is built on failure. The best players ever fail 70% of the time. Whenever I struck out or hit a weak ground out, I was furious. I didn’t understand how all my preparation and hard work could result in failure.It was not until my senior year of high school when I started to manage my understanding of failure and success properly. I am far from perfect but I am a lot more developed than I was back in high school.Today, I am a father and unfortunately, I see anger issues manifesting in my oldest child. One moment she is gleefully coloring a beautiful drawing with a rainbow of crayons then suddenly I hear a loud wail and she is angrily crumbling up the paper and chucking it across the room.So it apparently runs in the famil…but how do I break this pattern?Reading The Gift of Failure is definitely a good step.Small failures have a huge impact, and these impacts are good. I already catch myself overparenting constantly, but what am I really trying to do? Prevent a scuffed knee or a broken toy? That’s it? Is that worth it?We all know that we learn best from failures. We don’t need to fail at everything to learn, but failure can point us in the right direction.As my kids grow up, failure will become harder to parent, but failing to be a good parent is just not an option for me.This book is filled with what feels like just common sense, but when you are in the midst of parenting, sometimes nothing makes sense, so a resource like this book is great.