BOOK HIGHLIGHTS from The Gift of Failure: How the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed, by Jessica Lahey
Jessica Lahey on GETTING RID OF YOUR CHILD’S OBSTACLES:
“The setbacks, mistakes, miscalculations and failures we [shove] out of our children’s way are the very experiences that teach them how to be resourceful, persistent, innovative, and resilient citizens of this world.”
“We parents …have to step back, leave those scary obstacles lying in the road, and allow our children to face them head-on.”
Jessica Lahey on THE PRESSURE TO HAVE YOUR CHILD SUCCEED:
“Pressured Parents Phenomenon” = “Unless I push my kids to do more, be more, they will fail, and by logical extension, I will have failed as a mother.”
- “Many of us look to our children to provide the feedback we need in order to feel as if we are doing our jobs well” – if they get an A grade, we are great parents; if they fail, we must be doing something wrong.”
- “Parents are judged by their children’s accomplishments rather than their happiness, so when our children fail, we appropriate those failures as our own.”
- “Sadly, when we avoid or dismiss [rejection, disappointment, corrections, criticisms, failures] in order to preserve children’s sense of ease and short-term happiness, we deprive them of the experiences they need to have in order to become capable, competent adults.”
“The ability to attend to a task and stick to long-term goals is the greatest predictor of success, greater than academic achievement, extracurricular involvement, test scores, and IQ.”
Jessica Lahey on RESCUING YOUR CHILD:
“Every time we rescue, hover, or otherwise save our children from a challenge, we send a very clear message: that we believe they are incompetent, incapable, and unworthy of our trust.”
“Further, we teach them to be dependent on us and thereby deny them the very education in competence that we are put here on this earth to hand down.”
“But here’s the truth, what research has shown over and over again: children whose parents don’t allow them to fail are less engaged, less enthusiastic about their education, less motivated, and ultimately less successful than children whose parents support their autonomy.”
“Decades of studies and hundreds of pages of scientific evidence point to one conclusion that sounds crazy, but it absolutely works: If parents back off the pressure and anxiety over grades and achievement and focus on the bigger picture – a love of learning and independent inquiry – grades will improve and test scores will go up.”
Jessica Lahey on REWARDS:
“The less we push our kids toward educational success, the more they will learn. The less we use external, or extrinsic, rewards on our children, the more they will engage in their education for the sake and love of learning.”
“Rewards don’t work, because humans perceive them as attempts to control behavior, which undermines intrinsic motivation [and self-worth].”
“Human beings are more likely to stick with tasks that arise out of their own free will and personal choice. Given the choice between sticking with a ‘I have to’ task or doing something else, most people would choose anything that is the produce of their autonomy and self-determination.”
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO ACTON?
At Acton we believe in…
- The value of struggle- we allow our learners to try, fail quickly and cheaply, and try again.
- Our children’s long term developmental and emotional needs take priority over short-term happiness.
- Trusting our children, by letting them set their own pace and goals and by refusing to join the pressured parents phenomenon.
- Building intrinsic, or internal, motivation to do and learn by teaching learners to set their own learning goals.
Inquiry learning, or learning through asking questions, allows our learners to enjoy the learning process and retain more information than traditional teaching styles. As Lahey discovers through the work of psychologist Edward Deci (author of Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation), “just about anything humans perceive as controlling is detrimental to long-term motivation, and therefore, learning.”
TRY THIS AT HOME:
Jessica Lahey states, “The quickest way to kill off your child’s interest in a game, topic, or experiment is to impose your will on their learning.”
Test out this idea at home with the following experiment:
- Ask your child if you can play with them – then let them pick the game or toy.
- Defer all decision making about the activity to them for 15 minutes.
- Observe how your child engages in the activity.
- Then start imposing rules upon the game, slowly but steadily.
- Observe how your child engages in the activity with the newly imposed goals/directions.
