Lord help me, I have a climber. He is 15-months-old and can’t walk, but he can climb a dozen steps and slide back down and climb his way up to any destination he wants.
None of my other boys have been climbers, and quite honestly, it has sent my anxiety into overdrive.
My strategy with this bundle of energy has had to change over the last few weeks. At first, I would try to divert his attention away from the stairs, or anything he was about to climb. Then it dawned on me, he has to learn how to do these things, and I want him to be safe, so I need to teach him. I set out to teach him the proper way to crawl and navigate up the basket, onto the stool and onto the chair. He caught on quickly, but what I didn’t expect was the number of times he failed.
I decided I would not make it easy for him, if he wanted to achieve this then I wanted him to try, and as he tried he failed and failed. Every time he fell, or lost control, we would start all over until he got the hang of it, all of those failures have made him one great climber.
We learn when we fail, and our children need to learn through failure.
I am not suggesting setting our kids up TO fail, but rather allowing them to succeed and to fail so they WILL learn.
My little climber has reminded me of times in the lives of my older boys when they learned from their failures. In elementary school when my son tried out for the lead in the musical and didn’t get it, he tried his best but did not get the part, he failed and he learned. When my son tried out for 7th grade basketball, and he was the first one cut from the team, he failed and he learned. One time my son was in the Spelling Bee and made it to the finals, and failed and he learned, and he will forever remember how to spell homonym, H-O-M-O-N-Y-M, homonym.
The most recent was when my now college freshman was in high school, he tried out for the musical and got THE worst part. He was devastated and wanted to quit. I would not let him. I told him to give his best. A week before the performance, the cast list changed due to grades and he stepped in and took on one of the leads. If he had given up and given into failure, he would have missed a great lesson and a great part in the play. Sometimes failure is tragic, sometimes failure means not getting what WE wanted.
Failure is defined as: the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective. This happens every day and if we want to have well-adjusted children, they need to fail and learn how to change how they do things so they get the objective that they want.
As our kids get older, we need to help them navigate making good choices and help them when they make poor choices and lead them through their failures. Our instinct is to protect our kids and make things easy for them. We like to pick their teachers, their friends, their activities, and even what they want to do with their lives. We do them a disservice if they never get to experience accomplishments and failures. These are times for them to grow, and if they do that while we can still direct them, then we can help them learn through it.
My climber continues to teach me, each and every day as he finds a new challenge or couch he wants to climb. And there he goes: Step, Step, Fail; Step, Step, Succeed!