How Children Learn to Fail
The more you fail, the more you learn.
Children learn where they live. They learn from watching others and modeling. They learn from trying things out. And, they learn from their experience with others, specifically from the reactions others give them. They learn the things we instruct them by our reactions as being valued.
So, how do children learn to fail? I am not sure they learn to fail because failing is not valued as important to learn in our culture at home, at school, or at large.
If children are not learning to fail, I am not sure they are learning to persist, to persevere, and to ask for help in resourceful ways.
What I think a child does learn is if failing in their environment is okay, or not. I think children learn this from the reactions they receive from others. First, from their mother and father, their first teachers in the home. Then, from their teachers at school. Then from spouses and bosses.
Think about when a child is learning to walk, and he falls. The first thing he does is to look back at his mother or father to see if it is okay that he fell, or if he should be upset. If the parent gives very little reaction, the child gets the message that failing or falling in our instance, is part of learning, and he gets up to try again. If Mom runs over and makes a big fuss, there is a different message. Falling, flattering, and stumbling cause a ruckus, cause for concern, and even the possibility that the child has to do something else instead right now and cannot try again.
I remember in graduate school running across an article about parenting styles in Africa vs. America. The article characterized African mothers as deliberating sitting back and letting their children learn to play with their sorting blocks by trial and error, offering little interference or instruction as to what the toy is supposed to do.
These mothers value that the child’s figuring it out by themselves as part of their learning and growing. American mothers, by contrast, would immediately model for their children how to use the toy correctly, limiting the exploration of possibilities for the child. When a child would attempt to sort the shapes into the wrong holes, the American parent would be right there to correct their mistake, chastising their trial and error. Hover mothers from birth.
Hover mothers rob children of learning opportunities. They rob their child of using their body and brain to figure it out on their own. The message the child gets is that I must not be able to do it, and if I do it wrong, She is disappointed in me and doesn’t love me.
What happens to children when they go to school? Play ends and everything quickly becomes focused on the single right answers, keeping quiet, and pleasing the teachers. Mistakes, we learned early, did just the opposite of pleasing the teacher, and quite often disdain over mistakes escalated through various forms like tone of voice, frustration levels, seating arrangements, doling out of privileges, withholding hugs and praise, to outright humiliation if we made a mistake. We learned, then when I was in school and when my own children made the journey of learning through the grades, that losers made mistakes, making mistakes was painful and penalized, and that winning at the game of school hinged on being still, quiet, and always having the right answer at the ready.
One of the most elucidating moments in my life, as more than one teacher referred to me directly over the years, came when my son was in 5th grade at a parent-teacher conference that I attended, along with my son’s 5th-grade teacher and the head of the middle school division. The teacher complained that my son was difficult and unpleasant for her to have in class because “he asked so many questions. He is not satisfied with me to just tell him the answer, memorizing it, and go on, like the others….Do you think you could ask him not to ask questions in my class?” In other words, my son wasn’t doing his part by playing the game of school — be still, be quiet, always have the right answer at the ready, and make everything easy on the teacher. I thought I was going to come unhinged, and I am glad to be able to say that the middle school head was quite concerned and embarrassed for his teacher to reveal her small-mindedness and her values.
Asking questions, trying out what we think might be the answer, seeing what happens, and asking why again, and again, and again until we see the correlation and connection between information and elements, that’s learning. Learning involves inquiry, hypothesis, trial and error, observation, feedback, synthesis, and beginning again. Failing is embedded in learning when learning values learning these thinking skills and habits of mind. Failing is equivalent to stupidity and being unprepared when learning values right answers, rote knowledge, and passively receiving information to be rendered up again. Let’s see what we can learn is a completely different learning posture than I got that answer wrong. Which is better preparation? Which teaches our children that failing is a part of learning, and learning is part of succeeding?
Children learn to fail when failure is valued, modeled, and put in the context as necessary to learning. Report cards, awards, seating charts, daily notes home — do these express our interest in good questions, curiosity, persistence, and leading ourselves to discover answers? Or, do we celebrate right answers served up quickly?
We need to motivate children to achieve and to want to work hard to know a lot and know how to find out even more. But, it seems to me, that is a later value and that our earliest and most impressionable years are better spent valuing and developing skills of asking good questions, feeding our curiosity and our diligence to find out, to research, to make connections, and to engage enthusiastically through the learning process so that we can come to know. How do we recognize that on our report cards, notes home, and year-end awards? How do we make sure children know that failing is just part of learning? The more you fail, the more you learn and it adds up to invaluable, personal knowledge, gained by our efforts, not given to us.
