It started when Dano was in 2nd grade. Every morning, he’d lollygag and not be ready when it was time to go. Lis would continuously push him from one preparing activity to another “Is your bed made?” “Are you done with breakfast?” “Is your backpack ready?” “Did you put your homework in your folder?” “Let’s go Daniel, we’re going to be late.” This daily grind became so exasperating that Lis finally drew the line and said, “If you don’t do on your own all the things you need to do and be ready on time, you’ll just have to stay in your room all day and miss school. You’ll have to call your teacher and explain why you’re missing class.” Sure enough, it happened the very next day. Fortunately it took only 1 day in his room and Dano figured out that the pain of being in his room all day was motivating enough to change his behavior. This is our personal tale right out of the Ezzo playbook of keeping the responsibility monkeys on their back. (Let the Consequence Fit the Crime)
Homework was another constant project in getting the kids to own their best effort (Good, Better, Best) through success and failure. There is tension between two opposing valuable ideas – 1) Parents want their child to do well and be encouraged with receiving positive feedback on their grades rather than being discouraged by bad grades; versus 2) Parents rocket-boosting too much of the load on homework so that children don’t own the real weight of learning and truly understanding the material. This was a constant struggle. How much help do we provide? In the end, the bar moved constantly where we never accepted their first draft as complete. In that, they “failed” in a small way. Yet, we praised their effort, pointed out good things, and said that they were capable of better. Our help was limited to small corrective suggestions and probing understanding. This effort would give them ownership and provide grade feedback relative to effort, additionally teaching them skills on discipline, work ethic, responsibility, time management, self control, and more.
The idea of letting a child’s current maturity “fail” is only to highlight the idea that they must continue to gain control of, and own, their behavior. For example, a long journey for our boys had been to wake up at a reasonable hour rather than sleep long into the day. We don’t want to give you the impression we ran a military operation, but it is so easy for teenagers to languish along in drowsy behaviors. There are chores, friends, activities, and life out there. Summers present significant challenges to teenage motivation. It was often that Dave would invite a child to come workout with him. The boys agreed to wake up early, but alas, biology and late night decisions would veto the agreement. Dad did not rescue their failure by waking them up and forcing them to keep their promise. Instead, Dave would let them sleep in and miss the time together which was probably more painful for him.
In each of these 3 scenarios our children “failed”. In doing so, they had to come to grips with their own self assessment, as well as the family and societal implications of not meeting expectations and desires. We, as parents, also had to deal with those implications. There was an amazingly strong empathetic protective response we had to repress so that we didn’t rescue our children to their detriment. But we didn’t want them to feel themselves as failures, but just steps along the way. Our words would always reaffirm their ownership and ability to improve. We felt strongly that if they didn’t have an appropriate amount of failure to adjust to on their own, they’d have an inflated sense of self and an unhealthy view of effort. They had plenty of successes too.
Our children are in their 20’s now and in this, as we reflect back, we think we served their interests well. They own their lives, they all have jobs, all moved out of the house and are proceeding with creating a life. We look around and can see other family situations that serve as a caution with children failing to launch, unemployed, living at home, and seemingly living an adolescent life. Small failures are key to avoiding larger failures down the road. Did we do it perfectly? No. Absolutely no. But in the larger goal of parenting, to launch your child into life without excess baggage, it looks like our children are not the stereotypical millennial’s that are entitled to success. It looks like they’ll earn it on their own.
To your launch preparations,
Lis and Dave Marr
This is an important topic. Rich and Shelly Howard have written a similar Letter with some practical tips. Freedom to Grow.