Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail
A new study explores what happens to students who aren’t allowed to suffer through setbacks.
Matthew Benoit/Shutterstock
Thirteen years ago, when I was a relatively new teacher, stumbling around my classroom on wobbly legs, I had to call a students’ mother to inform her that I would be initiating disciplinary proceedings against her daughter for plagiarism, and that furthermore, her daughter would receive a zero for the plagiarized paper.
“You can’t do that. She didn’t do anything wrong,” the mother informed me, enraged.
“But she did. I was able to find entire paragraphs lifted off of web sites,” I stammered.
“No, I mean she didn’t do it. I did. I wrote her paper.”
I don’t remember what I said in response, but I’m fairly confident I had to take a moment to digest what I had just heard. And what would I do, anyway? Suspend the mother? Keep her in for lunch detention and make her write “I will not write my daughter’s papers using articles plagiarized from the Internet” one hundred times on the board? In all fairness, the mother submitted a defense: her daughter had been stressed out, and she did not want her to get sick or overwhelmed.
In the end, my student received a zero and I made sure she re-wrote the paper. Herself. Sure, I didn’t have the authority to discipline the student’s mother, but I have done so many times in my dreams.
While I am not sure what the mother gained from the experience, the daughter gained an understanding of consequences, and I gained a war story. I don’t even bother with the old reliables anymore: the mother who “helps” a bit too much with the child’s math homework, the father who builds the student’s science project. Please. Don’t waste my time.
The stories teachers exchange these days reveal a whole new level of overprotectiveness: parents who raise their children in a state of helplessness and powerlessness, children destined to an anxious adulthood, lacking the emotional resources they will need to cope with inevitable setback and failure.
I believed my accumulated compendium of teacher war stories were pretty good — until I read a study out of Queensland University of Technology, by Judith Locke, et. al., a self-described “examination by parenting professionals of the concept of overparenting.”
Overparenting is characterized in the study as parents’ “misguided attempt to improve their child’s current and future personal and academic success.” In an attempt to understand such behaviors, the authors surveyed psychologists, guidance counselors, and teachers. The authors asked these professionals if they had witnessed examples of overparenting, and left space for descriptions of said examples. While the relatively small sample size and questionable method of subjective self-reporting cast a shadow on the study’s statistical significance, the examples cited in the report provide enough ammunition for a year of dinner parties.
Some of the examples are the usual fare: a child isn’t allowed to go to camp or learn to drive, a parent cuts up a 10 year-old’s food or brings separate plates to parties for a 16 year-old because he’s a picky eater. Yawn. These barely rank a “Tsk, tsk” among my colleagues. And while I pity those kids, I’m not that worried. They will go out on their own someday and recover from their overprotective childhoods.
What worry me most are the examples of overparenting that have the potential to ruin a child’s confidence and undermine an education in independence. According to the the authors, parents guilty of this kind of overparenting “take their child’s perception as truth, regardless of the facts,” and are “quick to believe their child over the adult and deny the possibility that their child was at fault or would even do something of that nature.”
This is what we teachers see most often: what the authors term “high responsiveness and low demandingness” parents.” These parents are highly responsive to the perceived needs and issues of their children, and don’t give their children the chance to solve their own problems. These parents “rush to school at the whim of a phone call from their child to deliver items such as forgotten lunches, forgotten assignments, forgotten uniforms” and “demand better grades on the final semester reports or threaten withdrawal from school.” One study participant described the problem this way:
I have worked with quite a number of parents who are so overprotective of their children that the children do not learn to take responsibility (and the natural consequences) of their actions. The children may develop a sense of entitlement and the parents then find it difficult to work with the school in a trusting, cooperative and solution focused manner, which would benefit both child and school.
These are the parents who worry me the most — parents who won’t let their child learn. You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.
I’m not suggesting that parents place blind trust in their children’s teachers; I would never do such a thing myself. But children make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.
I’m done fantasizing about ways to make that mom from 13 years ago see the light. That ship has sailed, and I did the best I could for her daughter. Every year, I reassure some parent, “This setback will be the best thing that ever happened to your child,” and I’ve long since accepted that most parents won’t believe me. That’s fine. I’m patient. The lessons I teach in middle school don’t typically pay off for years, and I don’t expect thank-you cards.
I have learned to enjoy and find satisfaction in these day-to-day lessons, and in the time I get to spend with children in need of an education. But I fantasize about the day I will be trusted to teach my students how to roll with the punches, find their way through the gauntlet of adolescence, and stand firm in the face of the challenges — challenges that have the power to transform today’s children into resourceful, competent, and confident adults.
KaD says:
I agree, no one benefits when a child is passed from grade to grade to graduation without having even minimal math skills and being functionally illiterate.
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31st January 2013 at 6:07 pm
AWD says:
Parents nowadays were raised by baby boomers. What the hell did you think was going to happen? Boomer progeny are rudderless, no morals, values, ethics. So, they overcompensate, because they don’t want to raise their children like they were raised. Only problem, they don’t have a clue how to do anything. No wonder kids are so screwed up and are duped into paying a life’s worth of debt just to go to college.
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31st January 2013 at 6:43 pm
TeresaE says:
The ONLY job of a (good/effective) parent is to guide their child into being a productive, polite, moral, adult member of society. That’s it.
Not my job to play gopher, not my job to run forgotten items to the school (unless it was my fault they are forgotten), not my job to do her homework, not my job to be her friend.
It is my job to produce a child that will become an adult I can be proud of.
Because I get to work with my son, I’ve been privileged to hear about the man he is. I’m continuously told that he is knowledgeable, polite and a joy to work with. From customers, vendors and his co-workers.
That is success as a parent. Especially considering I was raising myself while I raised him.
So sad the bulk of these parents will NEVER know the feeling I have.
So sad for the rest of us that we have to live and work in a world of people that have been/are being raised to be selfish, stupid, self-absorbed and self-righteous little pricks.
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31st January 2013 at 7:35 pm
Eddie says:
I’m not a typical boomer parent. I know that. I think I was a good parent…and my wife was a GREAT parent….
But my kids still turned out to be teachers, musicians, writers, artists and adventurers. I did what i could, but the shit apple don’t fall far from the shit tree.
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31st January 2013 at 7:50 pm
Hollow man says:
And that is why you cannot find decent help anymore.
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31st January 2013 at 9:59 pm
Makati1 says:
I can only say that America deserves what is coming and it won’t be nice. Here in the Philippines, it is work in school or work in life. There is no ‘nice try’ award for participating. The sister of my friend here is currently living in the US with her engineer husband. Her daughter is attending an expensive private school, but they are moving back to the Philippines when her daughter is 12 so she can attend Philippines schools. They don’t want to expose her to the type if morals and attitudes and drugs found in the US. They are intelligent parents. I wish I could get my daughter;s families to move here with me.
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31st January 2013 at 11:10 pm
Bostonbob says:
Eddie you are the parent that helps to create the great teachers that there are today. It is unfortunate that there are so many truly gifted teachers today that get looked at through the same scope as the ones who are only there to fill a space. I fully understand that there are tremdous shortcomings in our poorly performing educational system. I just wish the teachers who spent there time and effort teaching really well were appreciated and not excoriated. It is easy to shit on teachers, there are plenty that deserve it. I still see many that work tremendously hard at a job that many of us chose not to do. As for the parents, I see this behavior all to frequently. There are an enormous amount of self absorbed douchebags who are totally clueless.
Thank you
,,,,
Bob.
,
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31st January 2013 at 11:26 pm
Why not helping helps our children | expatsincebirth says:
[...] Let Them Fail (theburningplatform.com) [...]
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31st January 2013 at 5:34 am
JJ3 says:
You know if we didn’t have to pay all the governmental education nazis and bureacrats at the Federal and State level we could afford to pay the ACTUAL TEACHERS more. Yet another reason to elimate government altogether. Any teachers out there, how much do you really benefit from all of the Federal and State oversight? Most teachers I talk to basically say it just adds headaches and paperwork, and think about how much we as taxpayers are paying for levels upon levels of bureacratic oversight.
Same thing goes for police and firefighters, eliminate the bureaucrats and we can pay the actual people who do the job what they are worth.
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31st January 2013 at 9:45 am
Incredulous says:
When will we stop this policy of “Too small to fail”?
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31st January 2013 at 10:35 am