Raising Successful Kids
Want Your Children to be Successful? Then Give Them The Freedom to Fail!
There is an interesting article in the Sunday, August 5th, New York Times titled “Raising Successful Children”. Here is an excerpt; “Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it’s the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world. But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.”
Madeline Levine the author of the article references the research of developmental psychologists Diana Baumrind and Carol Dweck. According to Levine their research supports the notion that successful children have parents who let children do what they are capable of and do not do things for them that satisfy the needs of the parents as opposed to the needs of the children. According to Levine overparenting does not result in successful, confident or capable children. It is a trap many anxious well meaning parents fall into without realizing that it can have negative consequences for their children. As Levine writes; “The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn’t bring you running) present the opportunity for “successful failures,” that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.”
Provide a loving, consistent and reliable environment for your children but don’t always rescue or interfere in their attempts to grow and learn. Read the article and let us know what you think.
To read the article, click here.
