The "Danger" of Failure

OK, here's the deal:

Sometimes, you run across young adults that are so committed to what they want to do, so passionate as to what they do that there's no way an adult is going to tell them what to do. Let's call them "headstrong" children.

In my experience, most professional artists met this description when they were teens.

On the other hand, most college musicians I have seen whose parents coerce them into a backup plan do not become professionals.

So that's my starting point - that *I* want my kids to become passionate and self-possessed adults who know who they are and take responsibility for their choices. I reject the propaganda of the modern educational establishment that failing is somehow dangerous or a threat to their lives, in fact I feel the very *lie* that "failure is dangerous" is a profound threat to self-realization.

It seems to me the question of "getting kids to see the whole picture" or "having an agreement with them" is just damage control of people having arrived at age 18 without a strong vision of who they are and who they want to be.

It frankly surprises me that more parents do not see a link between the environment they set up for their children to live in and the ability of a child to listen to their hearts. This connection has become very real for me in the years that I have studied and analyzed the relationship between giving children real responsibility over their lives (the freedom to fail), and "headstrong" young adults

This evolved from my own experiences with my two step-children, my two younger children, and my three step-grandchildren, and included my studies of John Taylor Gatto, A.S. Neill and Summerhill, John Holt, and ended up with Danny Greenberg and Sudbury Valley School and the Sudbury Model of learning (true democratic governance, self-initiated learning) and discovered that if children are allowed to grow up in an environment wherein they are allowed to fail and have REAL responsibility for their decisions, they will emerge and incredibly passionate, vicarious, resourceful and tenacious individuals.

In other words, what we are doing to our children by "sculpting" their lives is ultimately sabotaging them.

What I have discovered is that parents who take away the responsibility from their children and who attempt to "focus" their children's interests end up with kids who are irresponsible and don't know what they are passionate about. Tragic, right.

So I'm not writing all of this to criticize other parents. But I feel I have to respond to parents that are creating this for their kids, especially when there are parents here with younger children who still have a real opportunity to disregard the horrible, damaging conventional wisdom that we abide by here in 2004 to raise children.

fin wrote:

It's just darn hard to watch and NOT get in the way.

I hear you. But it's only hard if we make it hard. And we only make it hard if we sit their and make up stories in our head about the bad things that will happen to kids if they ever have to suffer. And yet there is an intellectual part of us that knows (hopefully) that suffering is the true teacher. Floundering and not knowing what to do is a person's way of trying to tune in their inner voice that got squashed many years ago.

Allowing a child to fail to get in music school and then either try again and succeed, or fail, or change fields, or flounder, is one of the greatest learning opportunities life could possibly present.

I think it is our duty as parents to take responsibility for our instinctual fears for our cubs and set them aside in face of the fact that the "danger" of failing is not a danger at all, but a tremendous opportunity that should not be stolen from them.

And I think we also have the duty not to transmit this viral lie that suffering is "bad" - it only builds failure up in our children's minds that failure is a horrible thing that is to be feared. 

It is not.  

Failure = information that occurs as a symptom of trying.

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