Sunday, March 18, 2012

Is The Secret To Success Failure?

In the past few months I have spent a bit of time reading about success and failure, specifically as it relates to young people. One of the articles that I read makes a very strong case that young people today must be given the chance to fail in order for them to experience true success. The article appeared in the New York Times and basically made the case that the generation of young people that we have raised in the last ten to fifteen years lack many of the necessary skills and character traits needed to be successful in life because as they were growing up, they rarely or never had the chance to fail. Some of you may say, “Huh?” I say, “Validation!”

As I have grown as an educator and gone through experience after experience with students, teachers, musicians, athletes, parents, coaches, and many others, I have become very observant. And one of the things that I have seen a lot is kids doing some amazing things. I have also seen kids do some things that are really not very amazing, yet those closet to them are pretty doggone impressed. And, I have seen kids get credit for doing something pretty amazing when it reality, they didn’t do much at all to deserve it.

The key factor in this premise is the adults that work with the child, most specifically the parents and teachers, in the case of what I see most of the time. Helicopter parents are the worst things that have happened to young people in the past fifty years, and we have a lot of them. Some of them hover just a little bit, but are still destructive. Others rescue their kids constantly and have basically created a handicapped child. When children always get what they want and do not experience “no,” or whenever something “bad” happens to them and a parent comes swooping in to make the feel better or fix the problem, we have a child that does not know how to solve a problem on their own. I once asked a pretty successful wrestler during his 9th grade year when he was struggling with Algebra “what is the toughest thing you have ever had to do in your life?” He pondered this question a little bit and then answer, “I don’t think I have ever had to do anything very tough.” And the truth was, he hadn’t! He had the worse case of helicopter parents I had ever dealt with and he did not know how to handle adversity. You see, true success, and a feeling of success are internal and come from a sense of accomplishment. We have to stop taking that opportunity away from our kids.

Most of you have heard the story of how many times Abraham Lincoln failed at various steps in his life prior to becoming President. The character traits of persistence and resiliency were never in question, and he continued in his quest to reach his goals. Why would our kids be any different? I have wondered if one of the best things we could do at school would be to somehow throw up a “wall of failure” and guarantee that every student will suffer some kind of significant set back so that they can pick themselves up and learn from it, problem solving and moving forward. The challenges that our kids are going to face beyond high school have a lot higher stakes and better that they face some adversity now while they are surrounded by a very supportive group of people than when they are out on their own. There is a reason that we have an insane number of 30 year-olds still living off Mom and Dad. They don’t know how to succeed when it is left up to them!

To “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again” is perhaps the most important of the 21st century skills that we need to teach our young people. Do we have your permission?

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