Let Your Kids Live

You want your kids to grow up safe and with every advantage that you can get for them. You want them to be successful in life, and to be happy. With these goals in mind, many parents take their parenting too far. Rather than letting your child learn things the hard way through failure, you get in front of all of it. While it seems great right now, it is a great way to set kids up for a tough future.

Learning to fail is one of the most important lessons that your kids can learn. If they are given everything and they never feel the negative consequences of failing while younger, they are going to struggle when they set out on their own and face the real world. If they don’t know how to properly respond when things get tough, they’ll simply give up or potentially even worse - help them learn how to deal with failure.

This starts from when they’re very young. Too many parents these days practice a form of parenting that is often referred to as “helicopter parenting.” This refers to parents who constantly hover around their child to keep them from falling and getting hurt or from failing at something. They don’t want their kids to get hurt ever, and they won’t let them more than a few feet away wherever they go.

There are times when this is totally acceptable. If you’re in a busy shopping center, or in a public place that is filled with a lot of people then you don’t want to let your kid get too far away. And you never want your child to get hurt (it’s not like you’re sitting and wishing they would get hurt). However, there are places where you should let your child learn and explore on their own - the park being one of those places.

Let your child explore the playground on their own. Don’t stand two steps behind them and constantly follow them. Let your child interact with the other kids at the playground - it’s good for them to learn to talk and make friends. If your child is still not great on their feet, then you can stay nearby if they’re climbing high, but let them run around the flat ground and check out what others are doing on their own.

Yes, your child may fall down. Yes, they may get hurt. Yes, some other child may not want to play with them. Guess what? That’s part of life. You help them get up. You help them dust off their bruises. You teach them that sometimes other people don’t want to play. These are the beginning steps of teaching them that failure is part of life - you have to get back up and keep on trying when something bad happens.

Teach your child how to lose. Play games with them and don’t let them always win. Get them into a sport so they can learn how to fail. Let them feel the pain of something when they don’t follow the rules you’ve laid out for them. Make them pay for something that they’ve broken. Teach them that when you make a mistake, you’ve got to get up and try again. Life is full of failures - getting back up is where we really grow.

Let your child fail. Let them fall. Teach them how to get back up. Teach them that out of failure comes success by trying again.