The Benefits of Failure in Middle School

Failure. No one likes it but it teaches us so much.

As adults, we know that failing in middle school so doesn’t matter in the long run. It may hurt, be embarrassing or seem like the world is ending at 12 but no one is going to ask you about middle school at a college interview or at a job interview but the sting of failure serves a great lesson. Saving your child embarrassment or pain by helping when you should back off does show him that you care which is great but it is also teaching him that you will save him. And it is depriving him of the opportunity to grow and develop.

These opportunities (because we are going to fail more than once) allow us to strengthen our executive function skills. Here is how your teen can grow these skills if you would allow them to fail:

• Working memory is the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks. It incorporates the ability to draw on past learning or experience to apply to the situation at hand or to project into the future. The learning opportunity here is that without the sting of failure there is nothing to look back on so, therefore, nothing to apply to new situations in the future.
• Planning/prioritization is the ability to create a roadmap to reach a goal or complete a task. It also involved being able to make a decision about what is important to focus on and what is not important. We learn from our wrong decisions, not our right ones.  Allowing your child to not do homework and then fail a quiz is an important lesson that you can discuss with them by asking, “Why do you think you did poorly on the quiz? Or what could you have done differently so that you did better on the test?” These questions bring up the conversation of studying more or doing homework to which you can ask him to tell you about his plan for studying.
• Organizing is the ability to create and maintain systems to keep track of information or materials.Failure can be small things – late to a soccer game because she couldn’t find her mouth guard provides the opportunity to talk about a system where she knows where her stuff is.
• Time management is the capacity to estimate how much time one has, how to allocate it, and how to stay within time limits and deadlines. It also involves a sense that time is important. When your teen is up late finishing a project or studying for a test may not be the time to talk about the fact that he needed to start earlier. But after the fact, talking about how that worked out, how he felt the next day and how to change it in the future is important.
• Response Inhibition is the capacity to think before you act-this ability to resist the urge to say or do something; allows for the time to evaluate this situation and how this behavior might impact it. The go-to instinct here for many teens is to blame someone or something else when they fail. To develop this skill is to take a purposeful pause to ask “what could I have done differently”?
• Emotion control is the ability to manage emotions to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior. When teens fail, they can become angry or overly disappointed with themselves or others. Learning to fail with grace or humor takes skill and loads of practice. Often this skill is related to other EF skills like response inhibition and flexibility.
• Sustained Attention is the capacity to keep paying attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue or boredom. Sometimes teens fail because they could sustain their attention long enough to learn something. The brain is like a muscle; we can make it stronger but only if we practice. Helping with homework undermines learning. Reteaching is fine if you understand the subject but then let your teen practice on his own without checking it.
• Task initiation is the ability to begin projects without undue procrastination, in an efficient or timely fashion. A few nights of not sleeping teaches this lesson to most people but not everyone connects the dots. Talk to your teen about their plan to transition from break time to work time. For many of my clients, this is where the failure lies and then snowballs into being behind and then overwhelmed and then nothing gets done at all.
• Goal-directed persistence is the capacity to have a goal, follow through to the completion of that goal, and not be put off or distraction by competing interests. This is a big one for teens because their perception of time is so different from their teachers or parents. To a freshman, going to college may seem light years away instead of four short years. Through conversation, parents can relate how today’s failures can affect future dreams of college if not changed or corrected.
• Flexibility is the ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes. It relates to an adaptability to changing conditions. If you have a failure of some kind has occurred how does the plan you had need to change if you want the same goal or failure has occurred making a teen realize that the goal she is working towards in not something she wants and therefore now needs to alter course?  
• Metacognition is the ability to stand back and take a bird’s eye view of yourself in a situation, to observe how you problem solve. It also includes self-monitoring and self-evaluative skills. EF skills do not stand alone this is the skill your teen in developing when you are asking questions from above.

 

Allowing your teen to fail is good parenting even if it sounds counter-intuitive. Failure allows us all to figure out what works and what doesn’t.