4 Ways Failure Can Benefit Your Child

During the 25 years that I’ve been raising my kids, I’ve seen a range of academic-, sport-, social-, work-, and peer-related successes, wins, personal bests, and victories (big and small). I've also seen awkward mishaps, school struggles, social catastrophes, and everything in between. 

Watching your children grow up is an amazing journey with plenty of highs and lows. It’s always exciting to see them hitting new milestones and thriving. Of course, that’s when all is going well. It's a different story when your child hits a roadblock and you watch him fall flat on his face. 

Naturally, no parent wants to see their child have setbacks. But quite frankly, failure is not only a part of life, it’s necessary. The next time your child faces one of life’s struggles, don’t fret—instead, embrace it. Mighty Mommy shares four ways that failure can benefit your child and even leave you as the parent feeling stronger.

Four Ways Failure Helps Your Child

1. Learn From Their Mistakes
2. Helps Handle Life’s Setbacks
3. Encourages Growth
4. Keeps You Focused On Your Goals

We’ll explore each in more detail.

1. Learn From Their Mistakes

Raising as large a family as mine certainly has had its challenges, but it has also afforded me a big advantage: the ability to step back and let my kids do for themselves. I’ve been outnumbered for most of my parenting years, so I've had to rely on my gut instincts and I've had to trust in my children’s abilities to make their own choices, even when I wasn’t totally on board.

This includes things like their choice of friendships, how they’ve managed homework assignments, not studying for major exams, and making poor choices with their hard earned money ($200 sneakers that were outgrown in a month).

Each of these scenarios yielded a different outcome for my kids, and although some of the scenarios ended in full-blown meltdowns—for instance, flunking the Spanish II midterm because watching the final weeks of "The Voice" was apparently far more important than studying—the bottom line was that they had to learn to own their own decisions—good or bad—and continue moving forward.

In Psychology Today’s How Allowing Children to Fail Helps Them Succeed, columnist Susan Newman Ph.D. makes a very astute statement about how today’s parent is trying to raise superstar kids,...

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