Don’t Be Afraid To Let Your Kid Fail

by Alexander Tidd

A friend of mine told me this story once. She's a school administrator, and this mother came into her office wanting to talk about her daughter's calculus grade. If you want to know the truth, my friend says parents are always coming in about grades. She always tells them the same thing—she's never changed a grade, not once, never will—but they don't listen. They just sit there with this hopeful look on their faces like maybe she'll make an exception for their kid because their kid is special or something.

Anyway, this girl had gotten a B. A B, God forbid. Her mother acted like it was some kind of war crime. "I'm worried about how this will look to colleges," the mother said. She kept twisting her hands around. "Is there any extra credit she can do?"

My friend told her it was okay to get a B in a challenging course. She said maybe her daughter would benefit from not being perfect for once. You should have seen the look the mother gave her. My friend swears to God, it was like she'd suggested the kid should jump off a building or something. "She's never gotten a B before," the mother said. Her voice got all quiet and tragic. "I don't know how she'll handle it."

As I understand it, hat's the whole paradox right there. These parents are so busy protecting their kids from failure that they're making them weaker. More fragile, you know? People have been arguing about this stuff for years—how much is too much, when do you back off, all that—but it's gotten worse lately. Everything's gotten worse. The world's full of anxiety now, really full of it, and parents have gotten even crazier about managing every little thing in their kids' lives. They appeal grades for weeks. They make sure every kid gets a part in the play so nobody's self-esteem gets hurt. They spend all this time arranging extracurriculars like they're building some kind of perfect college application machine. And the kids are just teenagers who are supposed to be learning to do things on their own. But no. I’ve heard some parents even hire these "rush consultants" now to help their kids get into sororities. Wild times.

The thing is, all these parents are conditioning their kids to be terrified of losing. They probably don't even realize they're doing it, which makes it even more depressing. But here's the rub: if you never fail at anything, if you never learn how to get back up after you fall down, you're not going to make it. You're just not. It's not about success, even. It's about your mental health, your whole life.

Acquired Immunity

My friend the administrator has been trying to explain this to people by comparing it to building immunity. You know how your body learns to fight off diseases? Acquired immunity, they call it. It's the same principle. Take the case of peanut allergies. For years, doctors told parents to keep peanuts away from babies. They thought it would protect them. You know what happened? Peanut allergies went through the roof. So they reversed the advice in 2017, and guess what? Allergies started going down. The whole theory is that if you expose a kid to peanuts early, their body learns it's harmless. It's like getting a vaccine with a weakened virus. Your immune system figures out how to handle it, and the next time you run into that pathogen, you're protected.

My friend the administrator, the one I was telling you about, she's come to believe that failure works the same way as those peanut allergies. That it's actually good for kids to mess up early, you know? Call them manageable setbacks. Kids need to develop "failure immunity," the psychological antibodies that keep them from falling apart when things inevitably go wrong in life. We all need practice. We have to actually encounter obstacles and push through them. We can't develop perseverance if we’ve never have to persevere.

There's a developmental psychologist, Ann S. Masten, who calls resilience ordinary magic. I love that. Ordinary magic. It's not some special quality certain kids are born with. It's just normal development, if you let it happen. But here's the catch: it requires what Masten calls "adaptive systems," and one of the most important ones is learning to cope with stress. Kids who are shielded from everyday challenges never get to practice. So when they hit something bigger like a college rejection or their first real heartbreak, they don't have the psychological fortitude to handle it.

The consequences show up everywhere. Young people feel this enormous pressure to be perfect. And perfectionism costs them. When kids absorb this message that failure is catastrophic, even tiny mistakes feel unbearable. My friend was telling me about this student who fell apart over one bad test result. The kid was crying and everything. "That's not me," the student said. "I'm not someone who gets bad grades."

This is what happens when kids are denied the chance to develop failure immunity. They don’t learn disappointment is survivable. They don’t learn mistakes teach you things. And they likely never learn temporary misfortune is, well, temporary.

Let Them Fight Their Own Battles

I’ve had the good fortune to know an instructor at Outward Bound. She led backcountry expeditions into the wilderness when she was young. Outward Bound's been around for more than eighty years—it was inspired by this Scottish boarding school, Gordonstoun, where kids didn't just study, they joined emergency-response teams. They fought fires, searched for lost hikers, did maritime rescues. The whole deal. The core principle of Outward Bound is that "young people grow when they take on real challenges."

They don't give letter grades at Outward Bound. But in that environment, mistakes become obvious. If you're not paying attention when the instructor shows you how to set up a tent, you might leave your groundsheet exposed. Then rain soaks your sleeping bag, and you learn real quick why you tuck that groundsheet under the tent. You learn because you have to. You mess up first, then you figure it out. The whole program is a crash course in failure immunity.

We need more of this, and we don’t have to send our kids marching into the forest to do it. We simply have to remember to let them fight their own battles as they arise, be there for them when they fall down, and encourage them to get back up.