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 morning routine 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.” You’re supposed to hand off responsibility when a child is capable of handling it. However, this daily grind became so exasperating that Lis finally drew the line and said, “Listen, if you don’t do all the things you need to do and be ready on time on your own, so I don’t have to constantly remind you, 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.” As you’d expect, 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 by receiving positive feedback on their grades rather than being discouraged by bad grades; versus 2) Parents assist too much on homework so that children don’t own the real weight of learning and truly understanding the material, i.e. parents deserve the grade. 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 doing better. Our help was limited to small corrective suggestions and probing for understanding. This effort would give them ownership and provide real feedback relative to their own effort. Additionally, it taught 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 effort 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, particularly now with smartphones. 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 force them to keep their promise. Instead, Dave would let them sleep in and miss the time together which was definitely 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. We didn’t want them to feel themselves as failures, just understanding that coming up short is just steps along the way to ultimate success. 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. Of course, they had plenty of successes too.

Our children are in their 30’s now and in this, as we reflect back, we think we served their interests well. They own their lives, are married, all have jobs, and are proceeding with creating a substantive life. Over the years we’ve seen other family situations that served 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 the larger goal of parenting is to equip your child with the ability to overcome failure, and like all humans, they will face their fair share.

To launch preparations,

Lis and Dave

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