Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Does Failure Lead to...Success?

I just read an interesting blog post on rochestersage.com and I am curious how others feel about it. Check it out here.

The title is I Want My Kids to Fail. From the title you would think that this is a horrible parenting plan but when you get into what they are actually trying to get across I do agree. You can't learn to persevere through failure if you never fail and the best time to learn this is in childhood so that it is easier to deal with failure later in life.  


Of course this does not mean that I actually want my child to fail because by learning how to make a failure into something positive and keep plugging away you can't really fail. 


The book Nurture Shock (by the way a really good book) discusses this after reading it is when I first really started to think about failure and praise. Nurture Shock talks about how children, especially older children, understand when someone is saying they did a great job just to make them feel better. They start to associate this kind of praise with the times that they could have done better. Odd huh? 


It seems it is better to allow children to make mistakes, fail a little bit, and not appease them and try and make them feel like they always to a great job. I am not advocating never giving praise, but it should be truthful praise and focused more on what they did to achieve their goal. 

I guess the point is how will they ever know that they actually did a great job if every thing they do is wonderful and great?


I hope you check these things out and let me know what you think. 


                                      

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