On Failure

In this Issue:

• Weekly Message for New Families
• Let’s talk about failure

Weekly Message for New Families

It’s Tuesday, which means we have sent out a new Weekly Message for New Families. You can read today’s message here, or visit the archive.

Let’s talk about failure

The very word “failure” makes a lot of us tense and makes us feel bad about ourselves. We are taught – in so many ways – that we must succeed (or feel bad if we fail). The reality is that we all know that there will be ‘failures’ in our lives: bad grades, job issues, relationship problems, you name it. We also know intellectually that by failing we learn things. They may be painful lessons, but we learn and we get better from failures.

As adults, parents and family members typically have the emotional capacity to understand failure and to look at it objectively. While a failure may sting, we have built the resilience to handle it as gracefully as possible. Your students – particularly those entering as first-years – may not yet have the emotional maturity to understand that failures will happen, and it does not mean they are failures, it just means that a specific task did not go to plan.

For many of our students who arrive on campus their first year as part of the crème de la crème of their high school, it is a sudden and profound shock to be surrounded by people who are as smart – or smarter – than they are. Their first failure could be on a test or paper or midterm exam, and it might rattle them. It could be a social situation: not getting a leadership position in a student organization, not getting into the sorority or fraternity they wanted, etc. For students who have always done well on all fronts – socially, academically, interpersonally – the first taste of difficulty can be like a bucket of water to the face: shocking.

My message to parents and families is to take heart. College is a great, safe environment to experience first failures. This is a soft place to land when times are tough – surrounded by friends, RAs, resources of all kinds (both academic and personal). And when the time comes that your student calls/texts/IMs you about X or Y failure, the temptation may be great to do whatever you have to do to make your student feel better. I am a mom, I get it.  But resist that temptation.

When you let your student experience that discomfort on his or her own, you help your student build resilience, which is a skill they will need from here to the end of time. We all need to be able to process bad feelings and disappointment and bounce back.

So even as your student might sit with discomfort, I would urge you to sit with it too.  As parents, we want to spare our children pain and suffering. But by giving our students space to find their own solutions or process difficult emotions on their own, we will help them learn that they are capable people, which helps build their self-confidence.

Why am I telling you all this now? Summer is a great time to talk to your student and have meaningful conversations. Talk about failures you have experienced – they may have no idea you ever struggled, or how you got out of those situations! Talk about what you learned. Tell them that they will inevitably experience failure, and it is OK, natural, normal. Remind them of the old maxim: “Fall down seven times. Get up eight.”